The Frankston Serial Killer Page 9

  The case of Michelle Brown, who was murdered in Frankston in 1992, was different because unlike Elizabeth Stevens and Debbie Fream, her body was found naked. Because of decomposition, her cause of death was never exactly established. She did, however, fit the general age pattern of the victims. When Debbie Fream's body was discovered in Taylors Road, detectives knew that she had met her killer somewhere between her home and wherever she had gone to buy milk. From there, one of them had driven to Taylors Road.

  Appeals through the media brought forward more people who had noticed a grey Pulsar driving erratically on the night Debbie disappeared, flashing high beams at oncoming vehicles. Detectives assumed that if the grey Pulsar was Debbie Fream's then it must have been Debbie driving as the killer would hardly have wanted to draw attention to himself.

  There was initial confusion as to which milk bar Debbie Fream had gone to on the night she disappeared because Michael, the proprietor of the closest one on McCulloch Road, had been shown recent photographs of Debbie, and didn't think she had been in his shop that evening. The police officers gave no details about the woman but in the following days, Michael saw the same photograph many times on the news. Detectives visited him a second time a couple of days later and asked him again but he still said he didn't recognise Debbie Fream as a customer.

  It wasn't until July 26 that Michael finally realised that he had indeed served the murdered woman in his shop. When that week's edition of Who Weekly was delivered, Michael read an article about the Frankston murders entitled 'A City Now Lives in Fear'.

  The pictures of Debbie Fream featured in that artcle were different from the hospital photo he had been shown; the one of Debbie pictured before the birth of her son wearing her hair down. Michael studied the magazine photo, realised that she had indeed been a regular customer, and suddenly recalled a woman coming into his shop on the night Debbie Fream had been murdered to buy milk and eggs. Though it was two weeks after the event, Michael specifically remembered the woman buying eggs because he kept them behind the counter and had to get them for her. Although not a hundred per cent certain it was Debbie Fream he had served, the magazine photo certainly looked like the woman he remembered.

  Detectives wondered why he hadn't recalled the woman when they had spoken to him on the morning after Debbie disappeared. She would have been one of the last customers he had served the night before.

  The time lapse between the murder and the detectives knowing for certain that Debbie Fream had gone to the McCulloch Avenue milk bar wasted valuable police hours. If they had known, in the days following her disappearance, which milk bar Debbie had gone to, they could have focused their resources by canvassing that particular area. As it was, they had to concentrate on every possible place in the general area that she may have gone to buy milk, including two supermarkets in Seaford, a number of other milk bars, and the Food Plus store on the Frankston-Dandenong Road which was a short distance from where her car was found.

  After Debbie Fream's body was found, a Seaford couple decided that the car they had seen the previous week on their way to the Seaford Hotel might have some bearing on the case.

  Michael and Lynne contacted detectives and told them that they had left home around 7pm to go to the pokies. When they were driving down Brunel Road, Michael noticed a small grey car travelling towards them. It was driving almost in the middle of the road, swerving slightly and the driver had flashed the high beams. Just as the car was about to pass them, the driver turned the high beams on and left them on. Lynne saw the car slow down to turn into Maple Street without indicating, almost swerving in front of them. She briefly saw a man in the car, turned right around so that his arm was resting on the dash board. He had looked at Lynne and she saw him laughing. Lynne could see that the man was fat with a chubby face and dark hair. She thought that it was young men skylarking and figured they were probably drunk. In her rear vision mirror, she saw that the car didn't turn into Maple Street, but kept going down Brunel Road.

  That information made sense if it was Debbie's car heading in the direction of Taylors Road.

  Another lead that hit the press was a taxi driver who telephoned Crime Stoppers anonymously to report that he had seen a man at a toilet block in Seaford washing blood from his face and hands on the night Debbie Fream was murdered. He reported that the man was driving a mobile home and gave police the registration number. Through the media, homicide detective Senior Sergeant Rod Wilson appealed for the man to contact police again. He didn't, but a number of other people reported the same man in the same mobile home and detectives were able to trace him. The man had no prior convictions and also had an alibi for the night Debbie Fream disappeared.

  Another suspect initially looked promising. A local man had a prior conviction for a violent assault after breaking into a home and bashing a woman. Although the man had a shaky alibi for the time of Debbie's disappearance and detectives had no firm evidence, they kept him under close surveillance.

  Then came a break. A local resident called Darren had actually seen a man get out of Debbie's parked car very early in the morning after Debbie Fream had vanished. Darren and a work mate had driven along Madden Street around 6.40am on Friday 9 July. The weather was cloudy and overcast and visibility was around 200 metres as the grey dawn broke. As the two men approached the Christian Centre, they noticed headlights go off on a small silver car parked on the side of the road.

  Darren watched as a man got out of the driver's seat and ran across the road away from the car. At the time, Darren had thought it strange because the man got out so quickly that he wouldn't have had time to lock the door. His mate commented that it looked suspicious and the two discussed the possibility that they may have just witnessed some sort of drug deal. When they passed the man, he turned away to hide his face.

  Darren described the man as being over six feet tall, of medium build, fair complexion and wearing a dark jacket. In the early morning light, the witness thought the man had dark hair with a pony tail because he thought he recognised him as someone he had seen walk past his house a dozen times before. He didn't know the man or where he lived, but he was almost certain he had seen him before.

  Uppermost on the agenda of all the investigators was to reduce the number of potential victims available to the killer and in that respect, the media served an important role. It was their screaming headlines and emotive accounts of the crimes that created a fear in the Frankston community that stopped many women going out at night; and if they did, they were more careful. All the same, detectives were well aware that it only took one woman to ignore the warnings and the killer would have another victim.

  The hunt spread to known sex offenders living in the area. Studies in the United States suggested that serial killers often killed within a small radius of their home so the detectives had the onerous task of checking anyone in the area who had prior convictions for sexual or violent attacks against women. Their task was daunting when a computer check of known offenders in the Frankston-Seaford area came up with 500 names. Eventually, homicide detectives narrowed the field to the 30 most likely suspects.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hunting a serial killer

  The similarities between the murder of Debbie Fream and the murder of Elizabeth Stevens were many. The two young women were killed within a month of each other and both murders had happened at night. Both murders had occurred within a short drive of each other and both victims had been strangled and had sustained knife injuries to their throats. Neither had been sexually assaulted. Both women had been killed and dumped in isolated locations.

  Rob Hardie and Charlie Bezzina worked on the Elizabeth Stevens investigation; while Debbie Fream's case was in the hands of detectives Rod Wilson, Mark Woolfe and Mick Hughes.

  One important factor in the decision for separate investigations was that, as far as evidence was concerned, there was nothing to directly link the two victims. Although inflicted on similar areas of the body, the knife injuries to th
e two women were different: slash-type injuries made with a small knife compared with stabbing injuries with a large knife. If it was the same killer, he had not duplicated the strange criss-cross patterns found on the body of Elizabeth Stevens. These differences were too important to ignore.

  The media immediately dubbed the murders the work of a serial killer, even though such offenders are extremely rare in Australia. In modern times, Sydney 'granny killer' John Glover had killed six elderly women over a year in 1989-90. In 1976-77, the remains of seven women, killed by Christopher Worrell and James Miller, were found in Truro in South Australia. Eric Edgar Cooke, and David and Catherine Birney had done their share of raising the murder statistics in Western Australia in the late 1950s-early 60s, and 1986 respectively.

  In 1992 the bodies of several backpackers who'd gone missing were found in the Belanglo State Forest in New South Wales, suggesting another serial killer was on the loose.

  While more common in America, Australia had largely escaped the serial killer phenomenon.

  With this rarity in mind, homicide detectives called upon the expertise of a police officer who had trained in profiling with the FBI. Inspector Claude Minisini had been a detective with the rape squad in the late 1980s and was interested in finding the most effective ways of investigating sex crimes. He had begun looking at profiling as a way to better understand offenders, their motives, and other factors which would ultimately aid in the identification of such offenders.

  After a visit from experts in criminal investigative analysis from the FBI's Behavioural Science Unit, Minisini made enquiries about studying behavioural analysis techniques with the FBI in the United States. In 1989, the course became available to international students. A year later, Minisini applied for and was accepted to the 14-month course at the sprawling FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia.

  Totally self-contained, the 200-acre property set in dense forests at Quantico had been designed by J Edgar Hoover as the ultimate learning facility. It had the capacity to house a thousand people, and had its own shops, bank, gyms and firearm ranges. Covered walkways connected all the buildings and in theory one could live there permanently and never leave the place.

  Most of Minisini's classes were held in the Behavioural Science Unit housed two storeys underground. To get into the facility, students caught an elevator down and passed through two huge reinforced metal doors. Designed ostensibly as a secure bunker in case of nuclear attack, rumour had it that Hoover would have used the underground area to protect himself. His monument to self-preservation was now fully utilised by the Behavioural Science Unit.

  At the end of his 14 months at the FBI academy, Claude Minisini became accredited as a criminal investigative analyst; then, one of only 32 such experts in the world.

  Of essence to profiling, or criminal investigative analysis, was the use of huge banks of statistical data gained by interviewing serial killers and violent offenders. The extensive interviews gave the FBI great insights into the minds and methods of such offenders. Using the data bank, experts could profile or analyse crimes and offenders, often giving police accurate descriptions of the type of offender they were looking for. Experts in the field learnt to look at the serial crimes from the interpretation of evidence rather than just the solid facts.

  Extensive studies of serial killers in the United States suggested that they were preferential in their victim selection, usually choosing similar types of victims. If a killer murdered young women then he - for nearly all serial killers were men - possibly held a grudge against women of that age because of a real or perceived injustice. Sydney granny killer John Glover had preyed upon elderly women, while the so-called Melbourne kidnapper and murderer, 'Mr Cruel', preyed exclusively on children. It was all part of a pattern that once identified, could be followed and predicted.

  In the United States, the FBI had interviewed around 30 serial killers and then continued by interviewing other categories of serial offenders such as rapists, arsonists and child molesters, to build up an impressive database of facts and statistics. Many serial killers had admitted to torturing and killing animals before they moved on to human victims. Many had suffered head injuries as children, or were the victims of physical or sexual abuse and many abused drugs or alcohol.

  The type of victim was considered a strong indicator of the type of warped hatreds the killer had formed in childhood and adolescence. A killer who chose young women may have suffered at the hands of a similar type of woman as a child. The abuse may have been as simple as being ignored or laughed at.

  Serial killer Ted Bundy murdered attractive young women; all his victims were brunettes who wore their hair parted down the middle and bore a striking resemblance to his fiancé who had jilted him.

  In 1980, African American Carlton Gary killed nine rich southern white women - the type his mother used to work for as a servant, who ignored him completely, and whose whims could affect his family's livelihood.

  Serial killers are creatures of habit. Once a method of killing proved successful, they tend to stick with it. If the Frankston murders were the work of one man, he had found his two victims alone at night and he had pounced. Chances were that he would continue to hunt at night. The Frankston killer's attacks - if indeed it was just one man - appeared to be random and he did not appear to stalk his victims for any appreciable length of time. The women were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Another frightening killer reality was that cooling down periods between murders invariably shortened as time went on. If the killer had waited a month between the Stevens and Fream murders, the next one could be in three weeks or less. Serial killers rarely stopped killing of their own volition. Capture or death were usually the only ways to stop them.

  Experts had identified significant phases through which serial killers moved. In his mind, the killer rehearses the murder over and over again, sometimes for years. When the fantasy becomes inadequate as a form of pleasure, the killer begins searching likely places in which to find a victim.

  If the Frankston murders were connected, the killer had so far preyed on women not generally regarded to be at high risk of being a victim of violent crime. His preferred areas were the streets of Frankston and its surrounding suburbs. He moved around darkened streets looking for victims of opportunity, staking out areas searching for vulnerable women.

  Some serial killers had the ability to interact with their victims - perhaps by asking for directions or luring them with a plausible tale. It was the experience of researchers in the United States that many victims had gone willingly with their killers under a false pretext. Ted Bundy would put his arm in a sling and ask for help carrying books or loading his boat onto a trailer. He was charming and helpless and women were only too pleased to offer him their assistance. Once the victims were cornered, Bundy pounced.

  Knowledge of the phase where the killer stalks his victims is perhaps the most disturbing aspect for police. While they were investigating the two murders, they knew that if they were hunting a single killer, there was every likelihood that he had set his sights on a third victim.

  Media exposure could work against them because the killer could be following their investigations and might alter his patterns to throw them off the trail. He could kill in a different location or at a different time of day or night. The widespread use of the term 'serial killer' striking fear in local citizens could also stoke his ego.

  Typically, a serial killer ensures that his victims are in a vulnerable position before turning on them. After capture, he enacts his fantasy on them, culminating in the murder. The victim becomes the killer's focus of revenge. Some experts say that the murder becomes a ritual re-enactment of disastrous experiences in the killer's childhood, only this time, the killer reverses the roles, re-establishing his power.

  Many serial killers interviewed by the FBI, spoke of an intense emotional high as the victim died, indeed some reported a spontaneous orgasm. Although Debbie Fream and Elizabeth Stevens weren't s
exually assaulted, it didn't necessarily mean that the killings were not been sexually motivated.

  Coming down from the emotional high, the killer would want to prolong the pleasure of the kill and it was not uncommon for them to take something from their victims as a memento. Debbie Fream's purse and bag of shopping weren't found in her abandoned car; they could have been taken in order to remind the killer of the act. The murder weapon was missing too.

  After the murder, the serial killer feels let down by the experience which quickly fades in intensity. He becomes depressed and since he was merely acting out a healing ritual, he realises that the reality did not equal his fantasy and nothing has changed. He had given the victim the false identity of someone who had wronged him in the past and the victim ceases to represent who he thought she represented. Nothing in his life has changed and he sinks into a depression. This lasts until the killer begins once again fantasising about recreating the murderous high and thus begins the cycle all over again. Like a drug addict, the incidents become more frequent in order to satisfy the addiction and the serial killer becomes more daring and often more violent.

  If the Frankston murders were connected, the killer had shown a preference for young women although if he was the same man who had tried to abduct 41-year-old Roszsa Toth, then he may have been willing to settle for an older victim if a younger one was not available when he felt the urge to kill. He may be an opportunistic killer holding a murderous grudge against all women. Another consideration was that Roszsa Toth didn't look her age and could have been mistaken for a younger woman, especially at night.