Underbelly 11 Page 5

  LINDA Stilwell was only four when her family left Hampshire in England, sailing on the old Sitmar migrant ship the MV Fairsky. They arrived in Melbourne in April 1965.

  Linda was the second youngest of four children. For her mother Jean and father Brian the new start in a new country could not save their marriage.

  In July 1968, Brian left for New Zealand with their youngest child, Laura. Jean stayed in Melbourne with the remaining three. She found a job working at an Albert Park hotel and the family moved into a flat in nearby Beaconsfield Parade, Middle Park.

  On Saturday August 10,1968, Mrs Stilwell had to dash to buy groceries – shops closed at midday on Saturdays in the 1960s – and she told her children to stay home while she was gone.

  But the temptation of the nearby beach was too much for the two oldest who wanted to explore their still-new neighbourhood. When Mrs Stilwell arrived home about midday, Karen aged eleven, and Gary, nine, had left. She dressed seven-year-old Linda, and told her to go and find her brother and sister to bring them home for lunch.

  Three hours later Karen wandered home, announcing that Gary and Linda were fishing on the nearby St Kilda Pier.

  Around 4pm Gary returned, saying Linda had gone to Little Luna Park to ‘look at the rifles’ with some boys. She sent her son back to find her sister but he came back saying he thought she might have gone to the local police station to collect some fishing rods.

  Mrs Stilwell rang the police and was told that two boys had been in to get the rods but there was no sighting of a little girl.

  It was several hours before police went to her house and realised this was more than a case of a wandering child. They launched an immediate search but Linda was never seen again.

  The three small boys, aged seven, nine and ten, who Linda had been playing with told police they had last seen her at Little Luna Park.

  Two days later, a woman contacted police and said she had seen a girl matching Linda Stilwell’s description rolling down a grassy hill near the Lower Esplanade. She said she saw a man near the girl. She described him as about 30, with a dark olive complexion, thin features and wearing dark clothing.

  She would tell police: ‘The man was wearing a deep navy blue almost black spray jacket, similar to that worn when sailing. The jacket was similar in appearance to what was referred to as a slicker. The man was sitting with his legs crossed looking out to sea quite intently, but appeared relaxed.’

  Over the next few months about 80 suspects were questioned but no real leads were ever established. Back then Percy was not on the list as he was unknown. Now police say he is the only credible suspect.

  Percy transferred to the troop ship, HMAS Sydney, based in Melbourne, on July 1, 1968, but was on leave for eighteen days from August 5.

  The victim was abducted from the beach and near yachts, consistent with the pattern identified as Percy’s modus operandi for murder. While the description of the suspect’s sharp features also fitted, the suspect was said to look about 30 years old.

  But when the policeman schoolmate saw Percy at the army graduation of a mutual friend at Portsea in 1969 he was struck by how much his schoolmate had changed. ‘At first I didn’t recognise Derek and I can recall seeing him and thinking to myself, he has aged at least ten years.’

  After Percy was arrested over the Tuohy murder the woman witness opened the paper to see the picture of the suspect on page one. He was wearing a dark spray jacket.

  ‘I got the biggest shock of my life,’ she was to say. ‘This was the same man that was sitting on the park bench the day that the little Stilwell girl disappeared in St Kilda.’

  Later she said she spoke to a detective who told her the man would never be released.

  But, about two years ago, when Percy’s arrest photo was again in the media and he was identified as a suspect in a series of unsolved murders, the witness came forward again.

  ‘I am absolutely sure that the man I saw sitting on the park bench, the day Stilwell disappeared, is the same man.’

  When asked by his policeman friend about the Stilwell disappearance in 1969 Percy said, ‘Yes, I drove through St Kilda that day’. Asked directly if he killed her he said, ‘Possibly, I don’t remember a thing about it’.

  When police searched his belongings they found a series of road maps with markings on them. One was in West Ryde near where the Wanda Beach victims hopped on the train, one was marked through the Glebe district where Simon Brook was killed and another was marked with a line to the Esplanade where Linda Stilwell was last seen.

  Forty years ago police used identikits – an American identification method consisting of 365 small plastic overlays spread over twelve facial categories.

  Witnesses were encouraged to help build a likeness using the available plastic pieces.

  The head of the Victoria Police criminal identification squad, Detective Sergeant Adrian Paterson, examined the old identikit images from the Wanda Beach, Simon Brook and Allen Redston cases.

  He found there was a ‘high probability’ it was the same man. He examined them against photos of Percy taken at the times of the crimes and found them ‘consistently similar’.

  The identikits were produced by different experts, in different cities using different witnesses. But there is no doubt they all look like Percy at the time the crimes were committed.

  Whenever Linda Stilwell’s mother, now Jean Priest, moved house she would go to the homicide squad to pass on her new address, still hoping that one day she would get the call that there had been a breakthrough in the case.

  But over the years she found the new generation of detectives no longer even recognised the name of her daughter and she knew the file had been forgotten.

  But Operation Heats has given her new hope. ‘It has helped me to know that people like (Senior Detective) Wayne Newman have cared so much and done so much work.’

  Now a grandmother, and still with the soft English voice of her youth, she says, ‘You learn to live with what has happened but you can never forget.’

  She says Linda was always a wanderer who loved to explore and had no fear of strangers. ‘She was happy and bright and would always find people to play with. She just loved everybody.’

  Mrs Priest said she wanted the evidence against Percy produced at the Coroner’s Inquest.

  ‘Then I will be able to put a name to the face. It could finally bring some closure. I just hope he would finally admit what he has done.’

  But she knows that after four decades of silence Percy is unlikely to change.

  DEREK Percy was surprisingly talkative when Operation Heats investigators questioned him in the Melbourne homicide squad office in February 2005.

  After all it was a day out and after 36 years in prison there were few events that broke the daily monotony of the regimented jail routine.

  He had aged relatively well. Balding, with a long grey beard, he retained his striking cold blue stare and lean build. He chatted happily while drinking tea with three sugars and nibbling on a cheese and tomato sandwich from the police canteen.

  Percy now spends much of his time collecting cricket statistics and remembers details from the games past but he still has trouble with his own memory.

  He is serving an indefinite sentence under the insanity verdict’ but he has previously applied for a minimum term – an appeal that has been knocked back because he is still considered a danger to the community.

  He still hopes to be released and a confession that he had killed many times would destroy his dreams.

  Having received a navy pension since his arrest he is one of the richest inmates in the system with almost $200,000 in the bank.

  Operation Heats detectives were to ask him 1535 questions. He could recall details of his childhood but when asked about the murders he would retreat within himself.

  NSW Detective Sergeant Adam Barwick said when Percy was asked about the Brook murder he, ‘was visibly different, in that his lip quivered, and his answer was “I can’t
remember”. I formed the opinion that Percy was lying when answering these questions.’

  Police believe that Percy’s repeated answers that he cannot remember stem from self-protection rather than self-deception.

  In other words Derek Ernest Percy is bad – not mad.

  But detectives say the charade that he was insane at the time of the crimes is worth maintaining. If he had stood trial in 1970 for the murder of Yvonne Tuohy he would have been released years ago after serving his sentence and would have inevitably struck again.

  Tom Attrill, the inspector who knew Percy when they were in the navy together in the late 1960s, was called in as an adviser to the Heats investigation.

  He says the child killer hasn’t changed and remains as dangerous as ever.

  ‘I have no doubt that if he ever gets loose he will do it again. After 35 years in the job I would like to think I have a handle on people and nothing has changed with Percy except he has learned to play the game better.

  ‘He is a disaster waiting to happen. He is highly intelligent, one of the most intelligent people I’ve met. He is cold, without emotion and looks straight through you with his crazy eyes.’

  Mr Attrill said many former sailors were disgusted that Percy received a navy pension and had become wealthy while in jail.

  He said it was vital that Percy remain in custody.

  ‘The only way he should be allowed out is in a pine box,’ Inspector Attrill said.

  For investigators the problem remains that the crimes were so long ago and the children who could identify him are all dead.

  But there is one woman who remembers.

  She was just a girl in the 1960s but like most children of her generation she was given the freedom to explore on her bike as long as she was home at a reasonable hour.

  She lived on the Mornington Peninsula and although she was only twelve her father warned her to be wary of the sailors stationed nearby at Cerberus. ‘We would laugh at that because Dad used to be in the navy.’

  Then one day around Easter 1969, (just a few months before Yvonne Tuohy was abducted at a nearby beach) she was riding along a dirt track when she realised a man in a cream-coloured panel van was following her. She said she cut across country but the van caught up with her in another street.

  The driver asked her for directions ‘with a pathetic little lost boy voice’.

  The girl thought he was a sailor because of his short brown hair and because she saw navy stickers on the car and one with the words ‘Go Navy or Go something on it’.

  She said the driver cut her off and asked her to hop in his car to show him the way home. ‘I was very scared at this stage because he was only a short distance from the Cerberus Naval Base and I thought to myself that he knows exactly where he is.’

  The girl pedalled into a driveway and screamed for help. The driver sped off.

  A few weeks later, after Yvonne Tuohy was murdered, police seized Percy’s cream-coloured van.

  On the back window was a navy sticker. And on the side was one from his father’s service station that read ‘Go well – Go Shell’.

  Thirty-five years later the woman, now a nurse, was working a nightshift in a nursing home when she saw a 1969 picture of Percy reprinted in a newspaper that instantly brought back memories.

  She kept returning to look at the photo, wondering why the man looked familiar.

  ‘It took two or three days for it to click into place. Then I knew the person on the front page was the same person who followed me all those years ago in Hastings.’

  Police are certain her decision to pull into the driveway saved her from being another victim of the man who can’t remember.

  DEREK Ernest Percy may be a man who refuses to say what he thinks, but the suspected serial killer cannot help implicating himself by his own hand.

  When questioned over the years of his suspected involvement in child killings his answers have always been the same: that he simply can’t remember. No denials, no false alibis, just a blank look followed by a non-committal response.

  In August 2007, after gaining an order from the Melbourne Magistrates Court, Victorian and NSW detectives again interviewed him over a series of abductions and murders that began in 1965 and stopped when he was arrested in 1969.

  While he doesn’t speak of his black past, his diaries have always documented his violent sexual obsessions. And it is that compulsion, which has given police a glimmer of hope of finding answers to some of Australia’s most awful crimes.

  The reason police moved to question him was that they had discovered Percy’s secret: something he had hidden away in a nondescript South Melbourne storage depot for decades. Inside the unit Percy rented were 35 cardboard boxes and tea chests filled with his papers and possessions.

  Much of what was found was innocuous enough – court records, transcripts and personal belongings. But a detailed search found a collection that would prove to be a window to Percy’s black soul.

  The material includes newspaper articles on sex crimes, pictures of children, a video with a rape theme and handwritten stories on fresh sex offences involving abduction and torture.

  Percy managed to collect and transfer the material from jail to his private collection, despite being one of Australia’s most violent sex criminals, judged too dangerous for release.

  Police now know that Percy, a former naval rating, has maintained storage facilities in Melbourne since the early 1970s.

  For two years after his arrest Percy was a model prisoner, but in September 1971 prison staff found he was writing about abductions and murders.

  The elaborate plots he constructed included abducting one or both of a schoolmate’s sisters in Mount Beauty: ‘Go down below the lake and meet her on way. Tell her my car is bogged down there and I want help. Get her in car and take her to place,’ he wrote.

  When Percy began legal moves to push for his freedom in 1998 the Supreme Court was told: ‘Since 1971 Mr Percy has never written anything which could be indicative of any sexual fantasy.’

  But the discovery of his stored material shows that after the diaries were discovered in his cell Percy began to hide his writings and clippings by sending them out of the prison.

  Police say the evidence he placed in storage indicates Percy has not changed: on the contrary, he deliberately hid incriminating material that would destroy his hopes for release.

  ‘If he has stored them he must believe he will get out so he can recover them,’ a senior policeman said.

  Police say that Percy has moved material from prison since the early 1970s, first to a rented lock-up at Pascoe Vale and, for the past 20 years, to the South Melbourne self-store unit.

  They found a 1978 street directory with a line drawn through the St Kilda Pier where Linda Stilwell was abducted 10 years earlier, and a pornographic lesbian cartoon on which Percy has written the word ‘Wanda’ across the top.

  They also found razor blades similar to the type used to mutilate Simon Brook.

  When Percy was arrested in 1969, police found that he had maps of the areas where Linda Stilwell, Christine Sharrock, Marianne Schmidt and Simon Brook lived or were murdered.

  Among the items seized from the lock-up was a stamp collection valued at several thousand dollars that Percy had compiled in prison.

  The first policeman to arrest Percy has no doubt he is a multiple killer. Alan Hyde was a senior constable in the wireless patrol in 1969 when he was called to the abduction at Warneet beach near Western Port.

  He said that when they found the suspect at Cerberus ‘We found Percy washing his gear that was still covered with blood’.

  He said they opened Percy’s locker and found ‘reams and reams of paper where he had written what he wanted to do to kids and women’.

  ‘We got him within two hours. If it had been two days, I believe he would have been able to put it out of his mind.’

  Mr Hyde said he believed Percy killed Simon Brook, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt.


  ‘The injuries were very similar to those inflicted on Yvonne Tuohy. I have no doubt he is the offender.

  ‘He was very quiet and very cunning. If he was to be released, I have no doubt he would do the same thing again.’

  In August 2007 a court finally officially found Linda Stilwell had been murdered. Magistrate Susan Wakeling granted the Stilwell family an application for crimes compensation, accepting Linda had been abducted and killed.

  Linda’s brother, Gary, urged Percy to confess. ‘Our family has been traumatised enough and all we want is closure. I appeal to any shred of decency within Percy to come forward with any information he has so that we can find the remains of my sister.’

  Timeline

  Derek Ernest Percy

  1948, September 15: Born in Strathfield, NSW.

  1954: Attends primary school in Missions Point, NSW.

  1956: Family moves to Chelsea.

  1958: Family moves to Warrnambool.

  1961: Family moves to Mount Beauty.

  1964: Seen slashing women’s clothing. Increasing reports of snowdropping in district. Percy is considered a suspect.

  1965, January 11: Wanda Beach murders. Mount Beauty locals see resemblance between Percy and identikit of suspect.

  1965: Starts keeping graphic diary. School grades plummet. Fails Leaving certificate.

  1966: Moves to Khancoban. Molests young girl. The crime is not reported to police.

  1966, January 26: Three Beaumont children go missing from the Glenelg beach. Mount Beauty residents recall Percy holidaying in Adelaide. Percy says he was in Adelaide on the beach on the day the children were abducted.

  1966, September 27: Allen Geoffrey Redston, 6, is abducted and murdered in Canberra. Percy tells police he has holidayed in the capital but can’t recall details. In the days leading up to the murder there are reports of a teenager attempting to suffocate children in the area. The description fits Percy. The suspect rode a bike similar to Percy’s and the victim was bound with a tie similar to the Mount Beauty High School uniform tie.