Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis

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СКАЧАТЬ Marnie. He described Marnie as being ‘very agitated’ and Vivienne was ‘visibly trembling’. Apparently, the two women had rung the Penguin Parade looking for him at 8pm only to be told that he’d left for the evening.

      Marnie left a short time later and Fergus said that Vivienne had launched into him as soon as his sister was gone, screaming at him, ‘Where have you been?’

      ‘I just said, “I’ve been talking to Beth.” She then raced at me with the glass of wine and screamed, “I knew you were with the little bitch.” I think she hit me with the wine glass which broke on the left side of my head and cut my left ear. I turned my back away from her and she hit me two or three times with the broken glass.’

      Fergus said he had been standing in the doorway between his dining room and the hall. He then turned and walked to a bedroom at the top of the house, where he sat on the bed. Blood was later found on and around the bed. However, forensic tests later showed it wasn’t his.

      He told McFayden that Vivienne had followed him to the bedroom. ‘She was screaming out things including, “I knew what was going on. I’ve been watching the number of hours you’ve been working. I suppose everyone out there knew what was going on.” She said a lot of other things but I can’t remember what they were.’

      Fergus said Vivienne’s rage had quickly changed to concern, ‘as there was blood everywhere and she wanted to take me to hospital immediately.’ Forensic tests would later show that Fergus’ blood was only found on the shirt he had been wearing, on a pink tissue in his bathroom and on a blue pullover belonging to Vivienne – but McFayden didn’t know that yet.

      

Fergus Cameron after his hospital visit.

      Fergus said he agreed to go to the hospital and they rang Marnie and asked her to come back and mind the children. They left before she got there.

      He said Vivienne was calm as she pulled up at the hospital, but, ‘As she was turning off the ignition she turned to me and said, “I’m just going to get the little bitch”.’

      Fergus claimed he hadn’t taken the threat against Beth seriously.

      When they got back home, Marnie left them, and Fergus said Vivienne suggested: ‘that we separate immediately, that she resign from her job and move to Melbourne [and] that I have custody of our children. I agreed to this and she said that I was an excellent father. She wasn’t a very good mother and I disagreed and she gave me two warnings, one was not to be too stern with the children, and not to take it for granted that Beth was going to make an excellent mother.’

      Fergus said that he and Vivienne had parted amicably when she drove him up to stay at Marnie’s house. He said that was the last time he’d seen her.

      The next morning, he got a phone call from Pam Cameron who said that Vivienne had called a friend to come and get the children in the middle of the night.

      ‘My anxiety was further increased when I was told that Vivienne had taken the Land Cruiser, which was parked in the shearing shed. On hearing the Land Cruiser, Beth would automatically think it was me and open the door. The two people who drove the Land Cruiser were either Beth or myself.’

      The crime scene examiners did a search of Vivienne and Fergus’ house. Brian Gamble sketched a floorplan, then examined every room. According to Fergus’ statement, he and Vivienne had argued in the kitchen where she had attacked him with the wine glass.

      Gamble found bloodstains in the hallway and spare bedroom, the bathroom and located the pink bloodstained tissue that Fergus said he had used to stem the flow of blood from his cut ear.

      There was blood on the floor in the bathroom, and bloodstained clothing in the laundry. The front passenger seat of the Cameron’s Holden Kingswood was also bloodstained.

      Gamble also noted the blood splatters when he walked through the doorway of the spare bedroom.

      His notes record: ‘I then entered the front spare bedroom… scattered over the bed were a number of papers. I observed a number of blood stains in the room. On the floor between the western side of the bed and the western wall, were a number of blood droplets. On the bed spread and papers on the bed were a number of blood droplets. On the front of the chest of drawers was a blood smear’.

      Gamble recorded no trace of the broken wine glass.

      A backlog of cases meant that it was a month after the murder before Dr Bentley Atchison, a scientific officer with the Victoria Police State Forensic Science Laboratory, analysed material collected from the Barnard and Cameron homes.

      At the crime scene and the Cameron home, the blood trail matched the stories. Beth had been attacked in bed and had bled in her room. The killer had washed up in the bathroom leaving blood around the taps. This blood would probably belong to Beth, but the drips on the path outside the backdoor might mean that the killer had bled at the scene.

      At the Cameron home, Fergus said that he had been attacked by Vivienne and had walked into the spare room and then cleaned up in the bathroom. Accordingly, the blood found in these areas would be expected to be his.

      In the analysis of the forensic evidence in pre-DNA days, scientist Dr Atchison used ABO blood groupings. There are four ABO blood groups – groups A, B, O and AB. Through analysing polymorphic enzymes present in blood, further sub-groups of the four main blood types can be identified. These further sub-groups of the four blood types are known as the PGM (Phosphoglucomutase) types.

      Dr Atchison found, by analysing the containers of blood that he had received, that Beth’s blood group was Type O, PGM 1 and Fergus’ was Type O, PGM 2-1. He had no sample of Vivienne’s blood to analyse, but according to hospital records from when Vivienne gave birth to her two sons, her blood group was Type A. Dr Atchison was unaware of her PGM sub-group.

      But since the three people in this domestic tragedy had different blood types, it would be easy for Dr Atchison to determine who had bled where.

      While the blood trail matched the stories, the analysis did not. Fergus’ blood was found on his shirt and on a tissue in the bathroom. The blood in the spare room was Type A – Vivienne’s type, and blood on the papers in the spare room was Type O, PGM 1 – Beth’s blood type.

      Blood examined to be Type A, which could have been Vivienne’s blood, was found on a maroon towel from Beth’s bathroom, the path outside Beth’s house, a cigarette packet and the match box found in the Cameron’s Land Cruiser and a face washer also found in the Land Cruiser.

      Dr Atchison also found Type A blood in the scrapings taken from the spare bedroom at the Cameron’s house and from their laundry. If the Type A blood belonged to Vivienne, it meant that she had bled enough to leave a trail through her house.

      Dr Atchison made a sketch of the pink nightshirt that Beth had been wearing when she was killed. He coloured in the areas of blood-staining with a red pen, and indicated on his sketch where the knife had gone through the shirt when Beth had been stabbed. The sketch indicated seven cuts in the material of the shirt – six in the front and one in the back.

      Dr Atchison later mused: ‘I thought some of the cuts [on the front of the shirt] were unusual. There were two holes [close together], a longer one and then a shorter one, with a small gap in between. I asked the experts. They didn’t really know. They thought it was a fishing knife. You had the double hole which you can start thinking of all sorts of knives... it penetrates making two holes. СКАЧАТЬ