The Frankston Murders. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ earrings and a watch with a black band. Rita identified the items as belonging to her niece, and tried to comprehend that the innocuous pieces of jewellery meant that her niece was dead.

      Bezzina gently questioned the couple to try and establish Elizabeth’s last movements. At his request, Rita checked the pantry to see if Elizabeth had eaten anything before leaving home on Friday. She told him that a tin of baked beans was missing.

      Bezzina nodded, although he didn’t mention the fact to the Websters, this was consistent with the contents that Professor Cordner had found in Elizabeth’s stomach.

      After giving their written statements to police, Bezzina asked Paul and Rita Webster if they could accompany him to the mortuary to formally identify the body of their niece.

      On the long drive from Langwarrin to the city mortuary, Rita still prayed it would not be Liz. She realised that it was hopeless, but until she saw her niece, there was always a chance that there had been some kind of terrible mistake.

      At the mortuary, the Websters were led into a small glassed-in viewing room. A silent mortuary assistant added to the surreal atmosphere by pressing an unseen button so that a curtain slowly drew back to reveal a body on a trolley covered by a sheet. Another assistant on the other side of the window delicately pinched a corner of the sheet and drew it back to reveal a face. Paul and Rita Webster stood frozen in their places.

      Rita Webster suddenly understood with profound clarity why there was a glass window separating the bereaved from the dead. Her first instinct was to run forward and grab her niece to shake the life back into her.

      Paul Webster simply stared sadly at the scratches on her face. He heard his wife say quietly, ‘Poor little girl.’

      Mortuary assistants had cleaned the facial wounds, and the sheet covering the body hid the rest of the wounds.

      The formal identification was brief. Paul Webster looked down upon the face of his dead niece and gave a short statement to the coroner’s clerk: ‘On the thirteenth day of June, 1993, at the Coroner’s Court, I identified the body of Elizabeth Ann-Marie Stevens who formerly resided at Langwarrin and was aged eighteen years. She was by occupation a student. The deceased was my niece. I have known the deceased for eighteen years.’

      The wait was over. Uncle Paul’s Lizzie had now officially become ‘the deceased.’

      7

      THE INVESTIGATION BEGINS

      Just before 8am on Sunday morning, Senior Constable Andrew Herdman along with five other officers from the search and rescue squad were briefed at the Frankston police station by members of the homicide squad. Experienced in conducting line searches, the officers had been called in to make a thorough examination of the crime scene at Lloyd Park and its surrounding areas. The officers consulted maps of the area and planned the course of their search before heading to the muddy grounds of Lloyd Park. Search and rescue officers briefed forty SES volunteers to assist with the line search.

      Half an hour after the search began, Herdman found a small silver-coloured knife blade in long grass adjacent to a footpath on the Cranbourne-Frankston Road. The blade looked like it had broken off from a pocket knife. Continuing the search in the long grass and bushes bordering the road, searchers failed to find either the handle or anything else of note.

      Back at Lloyd Park, Sergeant Paul Dacey joined other crime scene examiners searching the area. Twenty-two metres northeast of the culvert where the body was found, Dacey discovered a blue and white striped sports bag at the base of a sand hill.

      Opening it, he found textbooks and stationery items labelled ‘Elizabeth Stevens’. Further away in a pool of muddy water, he found a blue, hooded windcheater top with a blood-soaked grey T-shirt inside it. He had them photographed, then collected them as evidence.

      At the Hastings crime scene section later in the afternoon, Dacey was back by the time Charlie Bezzina arrived after attending the post-mortem examination. Bezzina passed on the items that Cordner had removed from the body of Elizabeth Stevens.

      The media were quick to jump on the story of yet another young woman murdered in the Frankston area. They immediately linked the death of Elizabeth Stevens to those of Sarah MacDiarmid and Michelle Brown.

      Sarah MacDiarmid disappeared from the Kananook railway station on 11 July 1990. Her body had never been found although a pool of blood near her car led detectives to believe she had been murdered.

      On 1 March 1992, Michelle Brown had telephoned her mother from the Food Plus store on the Frankston-Dandenong Road asking to be picked up from the Frankston railway station at 8pm. When her mother arrived, Michelle was nowhere to be seen. Her naked body was found two weeks later in a shed behind a gun shop in Playne Street, Frankston. Due to decomposition, a cause of death couldn’t be established.

      The moment that Paul and Rita arrived home from the mortuary, a young reporter ran over to them in the driveway and asked awkwardly whether they knew the dead girl.

      ‘She was my niece and we’ve just come back from the morgue,’ growled Paul, marvelling at the utter lack of respect.

      Once inside the house, the couple discussed the inevitability of media interest and, after some consideration, they saw the wisdom of getting the media to focus on Liz’s murder so that the police could catch her killer. They decided to go back outside and invite the reporter in for an interview. The reporter and her crew made their way into the lounge room and the cameraman immediately bumped his head on a low-hanging light fitting. It was to become a private joke between the Websters; every time another reporter or crew member would bump into the light fitting, they would add to the tally: light-six, media-none.

      It was the one light moment during the whole terrible time.

      When they set up office at the Cranbourne police station, homicide detectives Rob Hardie and Charlie Bezzina had little to go on. Usually, detectives began with the family and worked their way outwards. Most murders are domestic in nature and detectives often need look no further than the immediate family or a disgruntled boyfriend. In the case of Elizabeth Stevens however, the normal avenues were few. She had no immediate family in Victoria except her young sister who lived in Brunswick. Aunties and uncles were investigated as were the Websters, but detectives came up with very few clues.

      Could Elizabeth have been murdered by someone she knew in passing? The Websters had told them that Elizabeth was friendly to many of the neighbours and that they often saw her stop as she walked up the street to chat to whoever happened to be in their front garden. Rita Webster could only imagine that her niece may have accepted a ride from someone she knew vaguely.

      Another avenue of investigation arose when Paul Webster told the homicide detectives about a day a couple of weeks earlier when Liz had rushed in the front door, violently banging it shut. He had asked her what was wrong and she had told him that someone had followed her and that she had run all the way home from the bus stop. Paul had rushed out to look, but hadn’t been able to find the man who had frightened his niece.

      Detectives ran the names of all the students at the TAFE college through the police computer, checking them for prior convictions, especially of a violent or sexual nature. A number of students did have priors – one was a convicted paedophile but he was investigated and cleared.

      An initial objective for Hardie and Bezzina was to establish whether Elizabeth Stevens had in fact made it into Frankston on the day she died and secondly, whether she had travelled home again.

      Inquiries СКАЧАТЬ