The Frankston Murders. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ of the mortuary. He had only a couple of hours to catch some sleep before he was due back on duty for the post-mortem examination at 7.30am.

      Professor Stephen Cordner, the Director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Pathology, performed the post-mortem examination. While other boys dreamed of driving trains or being firemen, Stephen Cordner had wanted to be a forensic pathologist since he was a child. His father was a doctor and he had grown up immersed in the world of medicine. In his career, Cordner had performed nearly 6000 post-mortem examinations in the quest to find the reasons why people had died. In his youth, he had been excited by the detective elements to forensic pathology. Now he realised that police did the detecting and he was but an aid in their work. The real challenges lay in his courtroom appearances; helping to prove or disprove the accuseds’ accounts of murders with his own findings. He was well used to the sight of death.

      Cordner came into the spotlessly-clean, brightly-lit examination room and greeted the detective through the glass separating the examination room and the viewing area. He was dressed in dark-blue surgical pants and top, put on a green surgical gown and covered the garments with a white plastic apron.

      Snapping on surgical gloves, the professor turned to the young woman’s body which was still sealed in the zipped green body bag. The professor opened the bag and his two assistants helped him remove the body. Cordner began his external examination while a crime scene photographer from the state forensic science laboratory caught the proceedings on film.

      The body lay on the stainless steel mortuary table, bent with rigor mortis and still clothed in the grey tracksuit pants, white runners and socks. A floral vest was rolled up to her neck exposing her chest. The black-banded wrist watch that the detectives noted at the crime scene was still on the dead woman’s wrist; its blackness contrasted with the pallor of her bloodless arm.

      Cordner, although used to such signs of carnage, was nonetheless saddened by the loss of life before him. It didn’t interfere with his work but he was fully aware of the gravity of the situation; he always found it impossible to totally divorce himself from what the victim had gone through.

      The black humour sometimes used by the police in situations of death had no place in the mortuary. Cordner had a strong sense of his duty. The young woman’s relatives had every right to expect the best possible examination, not to mention that his findings might help police apprehend her killer. A common rhetorical question among forensic pathologists was: what can we do to help those of us who are still here and living? It helped to look beyond the death stretched out before them in the form of a murder victim, to a more positive approach.

      After photographs were taken, assistants removed the dirty water-logged clothing which was bagged and labelled to be passed on to Charlie Bezzina as evidence.

      One of the first things the professor noticed when he looked at the face of the young woman, was the tiny pin-point haemorrhages that dotted the whites of her eyes and extended out to the skin around her eyes. Looking a bit like fine red pepper had been sprinkled on her skin, these petechial haemorrhages were commonly suggestive of strangulation.

      Professor Cordner weighed and measured the body and then began to describe into a hand-held tape-recorder the measurements and locations of each of the cuts, scratches and stab wounds on the body. There were cuts and abrasions on the dead woman’s face and her nose had been broken. Cordner regarded himself as a conservative pathologist and while he described the wounds, he was careful not to draw absolute conclusions as to how they came about, knowing that such absolutes were conjecture and could be misleading in the investigation. However, taking into account the abrasion above her left eyebrow, her broken nose and the abrasion under her right eye, Cordner suggested the possibility that the killer had stomped on her face with his foot or used some type of blunt instrument causing all three injuries with the one blow.

      The dead woman’s left cheek had fifteen scratches, some up to six centimetres in length. The right cheek had ten similar wounds. Charlie Bezzina had described the manner and the location in which she had been found and considering the blackberry bushes growing nearby, it was possible that the woman had been dragged through them and they and other vegetation had caused the scratches.

      Professor Cordner described the wounds to the dead woman’s throat which had been slashed many times. Of interest was the fact that the cricoid cartilage, located just below the Adam’s apple, was fractured yet the more delicate hyoid bone above the Adam’s apple was intact. Usually in cases of strangulation, the hyoid bone is broken. The professor concluded that the force to the neck was inflicted below the Adam’s apple and reasoned that a blow by a foot, fist or knee could have been responsible for the fracture of the tough cartilage.

      The professor noted the criss-cross patterns clearly visible on the dead woman’s chest; the cuts ranged in length from six centimetres to thirty-three. The chest wounds showed no obvious signs of bleeding or bruising, indicating that they had been inflicted after death. The stab wounds were neat and contained within a small area of her upper chest, indicating that they had been done deliberately and with precision rather than in a frenzied fashion which would have caused tearing around the wounds.

      Examining her arms, the professor recorded each of the many cuts, bruises and abrasions covering the entire length of both.

      After the external examination was complete, Professor Cordner opened the body to explore the internal damage caused by the stab wounds. Internal organs were removed and the professor sliced a tiny section of each and placed it in a microscope slide to be examined and stored as evidence. Samples of blood and urine were also taken to be sent to a toxicologist to be tested for the presence of drugs and poisons. The organs were each examined and weighed, and then placed back inside the body which was sewn up.

      In his summary of the cause of death, Professor Cordner wrote:

      ...this woman has sustained a substantial compression of the neck. A fractured cricoid cartilage usually implies more force than can be applied by hands or a ligature alone and suggests things such as blows with a fist or foot...

      A number of bruises and abrasions to the arms and hands suggest that these may have been used in attempts at self defence...

      The absence of incised or stabbed defence wounds means that at the time the knife was used, the deceased was not able to defend herself for whatever reason. In this case, it is quite possible this was because of the effect of the other injuries to the head and neck... The professor found no indication that the dead woman had been sexually assaulted.

      In his report, Cordner wrote: ‘In my opinion, the cause of death was: aspiration of blood and haemorrhage from stab wounds to the neck in a woman whose neck has been compressed.’

      Detective Charlie Bezzina watched the entire proceeding with detached professional interest. Forensic pathology could tell him a lot about the type of crime that had been committed, whether the girl had suffered and most importantly whether injuries were made before or after death occurred. Details like this could help lead to her killer.

      Once the examination was complete, Charlie Bezzina took his evidence bags from the South Melbourne mortuary and made his way to the Hastings police station. There he lodged the items with the Hastings crime scene section and prepared for one of the more difficult aspects that a detective has to deal with – talking to the relatives. Bezzina drove to the home of Paul and Rita Webster.

      When they had watched the Channel 10 news the previous evening, Rita and Paul Webster had heard sketchy details of the woman’s body found in Lloyd Park. They were still hoping against hope that somehow the body was not that of their niece, despite their conversation with the detectives who had tried to prepare them for the worst.

      Those faint hopes were dashed when Detective Charlie СКАЧАТЬ