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      The shocked man jumped back into his car and drove around to the sports club where he knew there would be a telephone. He ran in and asked John, the club’s barman, to call the police.

      ‘What’s the problem?’ John asked.

      ‘I’ve found a body,’ Rod said breathlessly. ‘Near the bend in the dirt track. There were a couple of trees down and that’s where the body is.’

      The barman quickly telephoned the Cranbourne police station and spoke to Constable Sally Davis who answered the phone.

      Davis told John and Rod to go and wait near the location for the police to arrive. The men made their way down the dirt track, where Rod pointed to where the body lay. They didn’t get too close, but John could also see the grey tracksuit pants and the runners, as well as a black watch band, on the dead woman’s left wrist.

      ‘How did you find it?’ John asked as they stood waiting for the police to arrive.

      ‘We’re having a dinner party and I was looking for a tree,’ Rod explained.

      When Senior Constable Jeff Brennan and Constable Tamara Shauer arrived, Rod and John hurried over to meet them, then indicated where the body lay.

      ‘It’s over there in the scrub.’

      The two police officers left their car near a heavy chain fence and approached the location, careful not to go too close to the body so as not to destroy any possible evidence. They had to ascertain first of all that the person was in fact dead and secondly whether or not the body find was suspicious. After all, it could have been someone walking through the bush who had suffered a heart attack.

      The officers stood where the witnesses had stood, several metres away from where the woman lay. Senior Constable Brennan was quick to note the absence of clothing on her upper body; and the blood on her face. It certainly looked like she had met with foul play. They got close enough to see that the area would have to become an official crime scene.

      Brennan directed Shauer to protect the area and stop anyone from getting too close, while he returned to the police car to radio D-24. Homicide, forensics and crime scene examiners would soon surround the scene to each perform their respective tasks.

      Brennan also radioed his senior officer at Cranbourne, Sergeant Fred Barton. After twenty years in the force, Barton was used to body finds. Just as he was leaving the station, Sally Davis handed him the missing persons report and photograph of Elizabeth Stevens.

      ‘It could be her,’ she said.

      During the afternoon, Sally Davis had kept him up to date on the status of the missing person report and she had told him earlier that she had a bad feeling about the missing student.

      ‘I don’t like this one, Sarge,’ she had said.

      Sergeant Barton also had a feeling that the missing teenager had just been found. As he drove to Lloyd Park in the pouring rain, Barton knew that any evidence such as shoe impressions and blood would literally be washed away and he also knew that he would spend most of the night standing around in the rain co-ordinating traffic, media and the officers under his command. He glanced over at the thick black plastic raincoat on the seat beside him and hoped the rain would stop.

      When he arrived at the scene, Barton donned his raincoat and positioned his police hat over his collar so that the rain ran down the back of the coat and not down his neck. He walked through the long grass over to the creek bed where the body lay, careful to walk the same path that the other two officers had taken so as not to contaminate the scene any more than was absolutely necessary.

      Within three metres of the body, he noticed immediately that the dead woman bore a strong resemblance to the photograph he had of Elizabeth Stevens; except now her hair was plastered flat against her head so that it almost looked like a wig.

      Barton was puzzled by the scene before him. He could see that the woman’s body was naked from the waist up and, through the branch, he could make out the strange criss-cross cuts in her chest. The body was whitish-blue in colour and, considering the chest wounds and the dried blood around her nose, the death was certainly suspicious.

      But what puzzled him was that, in his considerable experience, if the attack was sexually motivated then the pants should have been removed as well as the top. That was how these things normally went. This victim, however, was still wearing her tracksuit pants which seem to indicate there had been no sexual attack – so why was her top missing? Alternatively, if someone wanted to kill the woman out of spite or revenge, why remove her shirt?

      Two detectives from the Dandenong criminal investigation branch, Michael West and Steven Mansell, arrived at Lloyd Park at 5.40pm. They had been working a district response shift and heard the body find call over the police radio. They were already on their way to Lloyd Park when they were officially called to attend.

      Sergeant Barton, who had procured an upstairs room in the Langwarrin Sportsman’s Club as a temporary command post, directed the detectives inside, out of the pouring rain, and brought them up to date on the situation. He showed them the missing persons report on Elizabeth Stevens, and described the similarities between the missing woman and the body in the culvert. He couldn’t verify they were one and the same, because of the obvious differences between the photograph of the happy, smiling woman and the bluish-white body lying under the branch.

      Even so, the grey tracksuit pants and runners fitted the description of clothes belonging to Elizabeth Stevens.

      The detectives then followed Barton to the location of the body. As they walked through the rain, up the narrow track towards the crime scene, Michael West didn’t know what to expect. Like Fred Barton, he too had seen countless bodies in his line of work and considered himself lucky that none had been children. But when they reached the site, West was immediately struck by how young and almost child-like this victim looked.

      Again, even from a little way away, bruising and a long cut around the left eye were obvious, as was the blood that had formed at the base of her nose.

      When Michael West saw the criss-cross cuts in the dead woman’s chest, he said, ‘It looks like someone’s been playing noughts and crosses on her.’

      Because of the water running down the creek bed, there was little blood at the scene and the conditions were eerie. Darkness was falling, rain pelted down in the deserted park and the body of the woman lay before the detectives.

      ‘Doesn’t look like a sexual assault,’ West observed, noting that the woman’s track pants and runners were still in place.

      Could it have been a sexual assault gone wrong? Considering the injuries to her face and the fact that her bra was pulled up around her neck, the detectives considered the possibility that someone had grabbed her with the intention of raping her, but that she may have struggled and her attacker may have hit her and accidentally killed her.

      Rain had washed away any signs of whether the body had been dragged into the creek bed; and it was impossible to tell if she had been killed at this location, or elsewhere and then dumped in the creek bed.

      West gingerly stepped a bit closer to get a better look at the dead woman. He shone his torch through the branch that partially covered her, then looked up at Barton and Mansell.

      ‘Shit. Her throat’s been cut.’

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