The Frankston Murders. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ was terrified. What did he want with her? Was he a rapist? Or worse? A couple of cars drove past and the man grabbed her hand trying to make their walk down Paterson Avenue look innocent.

      As they walked past one house, a man and a woman ran from the driveway towards a car parked in a street. They barely noticed the man and his captive hurrying past them. If it hadn’t been raining so hard, the couple would have recognised the large man whom they had both known at school.

      The man forced Elizabeth Stevens down another street towards Lloyd Park. He knew exactly where he was going. Passing bushland and the park’s tennis courts, the man dragged Elizabeth into a clump of bushes; still holding the gun to her head. He stopped her when they had passed a dirt track near some sand hills.

      ‘Can I go to the toilet?’ she asked, desperately trying to think of some way to get away from the man. He agreed and led her to a mound of dirt and grass, gesturing that she go behind it. It was dark.

      The man watched Elizabeth open her school bag and remove two pieces of folder paper to use as toilet paper. She went behind the mound and he turned away, not wanting to watch.

      ‘What’s your name?’ he asked when she reappeared.

      ‘Elizabeth, but everyone calls me Liz,’ she told him, not believing what was happening to her.

      ‘How old are you?’

      ‘Seventeen,’ lied the eighteen-year-old. Perhaps she thought seventeen sounded younger and he wouldn’t hurt her.

      She was wrong.

      ‘Do you want a fuck?’ he asked bluntly.

      The terrified young woman stalled. She told him she didn’t know how and her abductor asked if she was a virgin. She nodded.

      ‘Well, I won’t rape you or anything,’ he assured her.

      Elizabeth Stevens’s relief was very short-lived. The man began walking her towards the football oval goal posts and the urge to kill overcame him. He grabbed her around the throat and started choking her. Elizabeth had enough oxygen in her body to struggle feebly for a couple of minutes before darkness overcame her and she collapsed onto the wet grass.

      The man pulled a red-handled knife from his pocket and lunged at her throat, slashing in a frenzy until the blade bent. Elizabeth momentarily regained consciousness, struggled against her killer and tried to stand. He grabbed her and she slowly stumbled around him in circles, bleeding heavily. Her track suit top was up around her head. The man grabbed it, pulled it off and flung it in a puddle. He slashed at her as her arms flailed wildly, cutting her arms, her hands and her face.

      When he finally let her go, she fell to the ground where he stamped his foot viciously on her neck. The frenzy was over. He took a couple of steps backwards to survey his work. He could hear the blood and air gurgling from her neck and calmly watched for a full five minutes as the life blood drained from her body.

      Impatient for her death, the man lifted his foot above her head and brought it crashing down on her face, shattering her nose and cutting her cheek and eyebrow with the sheer force.

      Elizabeth Stevens died.

      The man dragged her by the legs the short distance to a creek bed flowing with shallow dirty brown drain water. Blackberry bushes clawed viciously at her skin but she was beyond feeling now. As she was dragged, her bra top ended up around her neck, exposing her chest.

      Then the man broke the blade off the bent knife and slowly and methodically made long cuts from her breasts right down to her stomach. He didn’t slash; he wasn’t in a frenzy now. He was enjoying himself. The rain fell heavily all around him but he hardly noticed. When he had finished carving the vertical lines, he then carved four lines across at right angles. After the crisscross pattern was complete, the man plunged the knife into her chest six times.

      When he had finished his handiwork, he put the broken pieces of the knife back into his pocket. Water lapped around Elizabeth’s body washing away her blood. He grabbed a branch from a tree above the culvert, wrenched it free and partly covered the body. The rain and the creek water would wash away clues of footprints and blood.

      The man threw Elizabeth’s bag 10 metres from where her body lay and began the long walk to his girlfriend’s mother’s house for dinner. When he passed the golf course on Cranbourne Road, he tossed the pieces of knife into bushes and continued on through the night.

      This man just wanted to kill. He had wanted to kill since he was fourteen. Now he had fulfilled the urge that had been gnawing inside him for seven years.

      Elizabeth Stevens died because she was the only person to get off the bus on that cold June night. She had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

      Less than an hour after the brutal murder, the man tucked into a hearty meal of soup and a roast, and waited for his girlfriend to come home from work.

      4

      A MISSING PERSON

      Paul Webster arrived home on Friday 11 June at 4pm. He had picked up his motorcycle from a shop in Bentleigh after working an early shift at the Ventura Bus Company. When he left for work at 4.35am, his wife Rita and his niece Elizabeth were asleep.

      He pulled the Yamaha into the driveway of his Langwarrin home and saw the family dog, Blaze, in the back yard. He realised that Elizabeth must be out because she always put Blaze outside and turned on the alarm when she left the house. Paul Webster flicked his remote switch to de-activate the alarm, entered the house and put the kettle on to make a cup of coffee. He glanced at the bench and saw a note from Elizabeth.

      Uncle Paul or Aunty Rita,

      I will be at the Frankston TAFE Library or the Frankston City Library. Home about 8pm. Frankston TAFE Library 784-8241. Frankston City Library 783-9033.

      Liz

      He thought to himself that Lizzie must have left late to go to the library because she was normally home well before eight o’clock in the evening. It meant she would have to catch the last bus to Langwarrin. If she missed the bus, she would be stranded. He could imagine her voice over the telephone. Uncle Paul, I’ve missed the bus, can you come and get me please? Not that he’d mind. He and Rita had become very fond of their niece since she had come to live with them. She had been looking for a family and found one with them. Now it seemed like she had always been there.

      When he took his coffee into the lounge room, the alarm’s siren sounded. He was sure he had turned the alarm off outside; this was the first time the switch had failed to work. Puzzled, he turned it off again.

      Rita Webster arrived home around 6.30pm after doing some shopping at Chadstone. Driving home from the mall, she’d been caught in the atrocious storm that had swept the city. She hadn’t seen her niece that morning either, having left for work at 6.30am.

      ‘Where’s Liz?’ she asked her husband in a voice showing faint traces of her childhood in England.

      ‘She’s at the library and she won’t be home until eight. She left a note with the phone numbers on it.’

      Paul and Rita ate dinner in front of the television and waited for Liz to come home. Sale of the Century finished with the host, Glen Ridge, congratulating the winning СКАЧАТЬ