Lambs to the Slaughter Read online

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Picture Section

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  EPILOGUE

  DEREK ERNEST PERCY TIMELINE

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Debi Marshall is a bestselling author, freelance journalist and teacher based in Tasmania. She started her career in 1986 at a newspaper and has since written extensively for national magazines, specialising in crime, features and profiles. Her account of the Snowtown murders, Killing for Pleasure, won a Ned Kelly award for Best True Crime in 2007 and her work led to her being recognised in Who's Who of Australian Women in 2008. An experienced radio reporter and newsreader, Debi has researched and written crime docudramas for Australian and international television.

  Debi has a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education and occasionally teaches English and Media at colleges and universities. She is also an accomplished public speaker.

  Lambs to the Slaughter is Debi's sixth book.

  ALSO BY DEBI MARSHALL

  Her Father's Daughter:

  the Bonnie Henderson Story

  Lang Hancock

  Justice in Jeopardy: the Unsolved Murder

  of Baby Deidre Kennedy

  Killing for Pleasure: The Definitive Story

  of the Snowtown Serial Murders

  The Devil's Garden:

  The Claremont Serial Murders

  LAMBS

  TO

  THE SLAUGHTER

  DEBI MARSHALL

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Lambs to the Slaughter

  ePub ISBN 9781864714746

  Kindle ISBN 9781864717334

  A William Heinemann book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by William Heinemann in 2009

  Copyright © Debi Marshall 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Marshall, Debi.

  Lambs to the slaughter.

  ISBN: 978 1 74166 651 9 (pbk).

  Percy, Derek.

  Children – Crimes against – Australia.

  Murderers – Australia.

  Murder – Investigation – Australia – Case studies.

  364.15230994

  Cover design by Christabella Designs

  Cover photographs © Victoria Police

  Internal design and typesetting by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound by Griffin Press, South Australia

  Random House Australia uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my husband, William, my mother, Monica,

  and daughter, Louise. I could not have

  written this without them by my side.

  'What man was ever content with one crime?'

  Juvenal

  Satires, first century AD

  PROLOGUE

  August, 2008. A melange of humanity, alienated and ragged, spews from the overcast, dank streets of Melbourne onto the early morning trams. Everywhere seems a cacophony, surreal and Kafkaesque, as though I have inadvertently stepped onto a post-apocalyptic movie set. The tram has crisscrossed the city and its geographical social divide from leafy, upmarket Hawthorn, where I am staying, with its lemon-scented cafés and chic boutiques, through the city's jarring heart with its commotion and chaos and onward to North Melbourne, where once-majestic Victorian homes, now in sad disrepair, jostle with car workshops.

  A sallow-faced junkie, his vacant eyes fluttering open and closed, incessantly scratches an inside elbow tortured by needle marks before he keels forward in slow motion, on the nod. A man in a business suit watches and turns away, and I am riveted to my seat. Should I rouse this stoned stranger, or should I wait? How long does one wait; what is acceptable? A moment later he is on his feet, lurching distractedly off the tram. He lists along the footpath as a young couple, gaunt as corpses, with pockmarked transparent skins and the scatty agitation of speed freaks, hurl foul abuse at one other, oblivious to the sideways glances of passers-by or the irony of slugging it out at nine o'clock in the morning in front of an advertisement that warns, 'Ice: It's a dirty drug.'

  Two women in soiled black tracksuits that fail to hide their paunches swig from long-neck bottles of beer as they stagger onto the tram. 'What the fuck're you lookin' at?' they slur at a bewildered elderly man before they, too, stumble off at the next stop. I hunker down with my book, trying to look unobtrusive; trying not to stare with repulsed fascination at the middle-aged woman sitting directly in front of me who loudly and continually grunts while caressing the bearded growth on her chin. Tram brakes squeal, ambulances scream past, gaudy illuminated signs compete for attention. My nerve
s rattle.

  The cloistered, hushed inner sanctum of Victoria's Public Record Office, which houses the state's archives, is a blessed respite from the bedlam outside. Security staff bid me a quiet good morning and assign me a locker in which to store my personal belongings. No handbags, mobile phones or pens are allowed inside this library, where precious archival material is handled by staff wearing soft cotton gloves. The file that I ordered a week ago – the Body Card Series, created when a body arrives at a hospital and used to determine whether it is necessary to hold an inquest – is waiting for me, a plump manila folder bulging with its promise of details to flesh out the forty-year-old story I am researching. Inside are the depositions of witnesses and police, autopsy reports and photographs.

  I settle in at the long table, pencil and paper at the ready, and open the file. For more than twenty years, as a journalist and author, I have written about crime. In yellowing coronial files and the depositions of police witnesses; in the eyes of parents weeping for lost, abducted children; in the thousands of hours researching and writing true-crime books and countless magazine stories, I have observed the worst of human depravity, the darkest excesses of the human soul. I have written stories about paedophiles, rapists, serial killers and child killers. So many stories: the savagery of the so-called 'bodies in the barrel' Snowtown killers; the murder of seventeen-month-old Deidre Kennedy, whose killer dressed her in women's underwear before throwing her body on top of a toilet block; the unsolved serial killings of the beautiful young women from the salubrious suburb of Claremont, Perth, Western Australia. So many terrible, terrible stories: the Port Arthur tragedy, and the mother who broke her silence after four years and sobbed in my arms as she recounted how she had thrown herself over her fifteen-year-old daughter's body in a vain effort to protect her from Martin Bryant's bullets. He shot the girl anyway: in the head at point-blank range. Or the mother of another teenage girl, abducted from a bus stop, who wept that her daughter could not have recognised even one of the four men who had raped and killed her, as she was totally blind. Stories told me by police officers and paramedics, too unpalatable for the daily press, of parents bartering their children with old men for sex in exchange for cigarettes and mothers holding down their crying kids while their step-fathers rape them. Stories told me by people cradling secrets so bleak they stay permanently off the record; stories so horrendous that they beggar belief.

  But I am in no way prepared for what I read and see here, today. An hour later, cold, shaking and stunned by the obscene ramblings of a sadistic sexual pervert with a homicidal penchant for children, I put down my pencil. 'Oh, sweet Jesus,' I say out loud, incurring a stern look from the starchy woman sitting opposite me. I walk outside and gulp fresh air, trying to drown the bile that has risen insidiously in my throat. Oh, sweet Jesus.

  I am resolute, determined, by the time I turn the key in the door of the convict brick cottage that is our home. First thing in the morning I will telephone my publisher and negotiate a way to exit the contract for this book. She will understand, I am sure, once I tell her the sordid, fetid details of the sexual barbarism and savagery spelled out in the cold, detached language of the autopsy report I have just read. How can I spend a year immersed in these vile fantasies; in the utter, utter horror of what Derek Percy inflicted on a defenceless 12-year-old schoolgirl, Yvonne Tuohy and – God forbid – possibly several other children? How many other children? What good can possibly come from dredging up these stories and regurgitating the shocking details onto the page, the details that made me feel like a dirty voyeur, peeping at a child's unimaginable terror and helpless to do anything about it.

  A full night's sleep evades me. I develop what I christen my 'dark stomach' – a roiling gut that tumbles over and over like clothes in a dryer and I think of the caution in the Chinese proverb, 'He who too long hunts dragons becomes a dragon himself.' Sepia newspaper images of the murdered girl's face flicker in front of me: small, feisty Yvonne Elizabeth Tuohy, whose appalling injuries and torture leading to her death were reported by the media in the detached, objective vernacular of an autopsy report. I obsess so much about this girl that I seriously fear I will lose my grip on sanity.

  And now I start fretting about what to tell the families. What will I say to Yvonne's sister, Denise, who, for the first time in forty years – the first time ever – has agreed to trust me, a journalist, enough to tell me about her family's sorrow and the harrowing, stark repercussions of sudden death. Denise – then just a young, innocent schoolgirl herself, now a woman in her fifties, shadowed by the past – is frightened that death has robbed her younger sibling of identity. She is scared that the pain her family suffered – resounding night after night in her mother's muffled sobbing, and in her father's deeply-felt shame that his stiff-upper-lip decorum deserted him when Yvonne's mutilated body was discovered – was for naught; that her carefree, lovely sister will be forgotten. And what to tell Jean Priest, who spent a morning talking to me about her seven-year-old daughter, Linda, who vanished into a void thirty-nine years ago and was never seen again? What to tell Jean, who thanked me for telling Linda's story; who could not mouth the name of the man whom she is certain abducted and murdered her child; who told me in a voice contorted with rage and sorrow, 'Write this story, for he must never get out of prison'? What to tell her of the reasons why I cannot continue? What will I say to the father of three-year-old Sydney toddler Simon Brook, who was lured from his own backyard on a winter's day in 1968. His crumpled, mutilated body was found nearby at an overgrown, vacant block. What to tell his father, a retired professor who articulated such a poignant explanation about the effects of Simon's murder? 'There is no end to grief,' he told me. 'It just comes upon one less frequently as the years go by.'

  I pace the cottage floors most of the night. I will find a way to break it to this mother, this sister, this father. I'll break it to them gently, and to all the other people who have dredged their memories to colour in this story for me. But first I will call my publisher and tell her I can't continue. I will call her, definitely. First thing tomorrow morning.

  1

  He sits silent and cuffed in the back seat, between First Constable Bernie Delaney and Detective Sergeant Dick Knight, as they drive out of Frankston police station and onto the dark country roads. Detective Senior Constable Alan Porter, fastidious and organised, has been delegated the job of driving to the scene. Detective Inspector Jack Ford, sitting in the front passenger seat, is deep in contemplation.

  Twenty minutes later they are approaching the tiny township of Five Ways, fifteen miles from Frankston. The prisoner peers out into the darkness. 'I think the road is off here somewhere,' he says, his voice high and girly, but soft, barely more than a whisper. 'I came in at the other end. Just go slowly.'

  Knight radios to the two police vehicles and the Forensic Science van travelling behind to pull over. 'Where is it, exactly?' he asks and the man points to a dirt road running south off the highway. The vehicles move slowly now. A mile north of the first location he indicates another dirt track on the eastern side of the road. 'That's the place,' he suddenly announces. 'She's in there.'

  The bush is silent now, at three a.m., save for the slight rustle of leaves and the quiet murmurs of the officers as they search this lonely paddock with the gently lyrical name – Devon Meadows – adjacent to the Baxter–Tooradin road at Victoria's Westernport Bay. Out of respect, the officers have dropped their half-smoked cigarettes and ground them into the dirt underfoot near their vehicle, drawing their suit coats tighter and buffering themselves against the mid-winter chill. It is so dark out here that even with the illumination of the car headlights they struggle to see their feet as they walk. Foraging animals scuttle in the darkness, kicking up small puffs of dust, pausing in their nocturnal work as the police draw near.

  The police sense she is nearby even before they see her slender, mutilated body caught in the small circle of light thrown out by their torches. She is sprawled carelessly on
the earth in rigor mortis, lying on her side under a clump of ti-tree forty yards from the vehicles, her slight body hastily re-dressed in a mauve tracksuit, its top pulled down to her shoulders. Her shoes have been thrown away nearby, but her feet are still in ankle socks. A filthy piece of material has been jammed tightly in her mouth, covered by a cloth gag and secured with rope. Her throat is cut, ear to ear, the wound a mass of coagulated blood; a cut so deep she has almost been decapitated. A jagged 38-centimetre wound, 5 centimetres wide, runs from her flat chest to her vagina, exposing gaping intestines. Eviscerated, slaughtered; her killer has lingered at the scene, carving her, slashing her like a piece of meat.

  'Oh, Jesus. The poor little child,' Delaney murmurs, shaking his head. 'Oh, God help her.'

  There has been no attempt to hide her body, no attempt to cover the surrounding earth: a bloody mosaic of viscera, matted hair and soiled clothing. The detectives shuffle slightly as Knight nods to Senior Detective Ken Robertson to turn the girl over. He rests on his haunches, bending to her, and carefully rolls her onto her right side. Her wrists are tied firmly behind her back and purple, livid marks show where the cord has been knotted tight.

  A sludgy, mud-brown substance stuck with clumps of grass is smeared on her torso, legs and face. The police recognise this substance instantly. Faeces. Added to the other injuries and torture to which this young girl has been subjected, this somehow seems the saddest indignity of all.

  Her killer stares down at the girl, his face vacant, betraying nothing.

  'Take him back to the car,' Knight orders. Porter guides the man into the vehicle, warning, 'Watch it, watch your head there,' but the prisoner says nothing, shuffling into position in the middle of the back seat. Cheekbones chiselled in gaunt face and prominent straight nose with a narrow bridge, longer at the tip. Slightly receding hairline and wavy-brown hair shorter on sides than top. Deep-set watery-blue eyes and medium-wide mouth. His skin is translucently pale; his chin angular. His cuffed hands and long fingers are clammy but quiet in his lap; his breathing – shallow and even. There is not a flicker of movement in his face, not one ripple of motion in his body. He stares straight ahead, like a sculpture, sullen, mute and still.