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.’
The police officers discussed this new observation; it put a different slant on the death. If the killing had been an attempted rape gone wrong, it would have been easy for the attacker to hit her to keep her quiet. But it took a different type of person altogether to cut a woman’s throat.
To West, it suggested the killer was some kind of maniac. But their theories were all academic because they knew that the homicide squad would be the ones to investigate this murder.
West and Mansell contacted homicide and made arrangements for a command post to be set up in Lloyd Park. It was Sergeant Fred Barton’s job to direct the human traffic through the scene and help maintain the log of all members coming and going.
Through the rain, Barton saw a huge red Country Fire Authority bus pull into the park’s driveway. He walked over and asked the driver what it was doing there. The driver explained that a police officer from Chelsea, who was also a volunteer CFA member, had heard about the body find via the police radio and organised for the vehicle to be sent to Lloyd Park.
To Barton, this was like a gift from the gods – the rain hadn’t let up and there was no shelter in the immediate area. He directed the driver to park the bus near the chain link fence; it became the command post. The CFA bus was equipped with telephones, fax machines and – of immediate importance to the half-frozen officers – a coffee machine. A huge awning was also lifted from one side of the bus to provide shelter.
As darkness fell, State Emergency Service workers arrived and erected huge, bright scene lights that illuminated the whole area. The body couldn’t be moved until crime scene photographs and video of the scene had been taken.
Sergeant Paul Dacey from the Hastings crime scene section arrived at Lloyd Park at 7.30pm. By then it was freezing cold, raining heavily and hailing intermittently. Dacey knew that the weather conditions in this case favoured the killer because valuable forensic evidence such as blood, hair and shoe impressions would be washed away. In fact, it was the worst weather Dacey had ever struck at a crime scene; he had to balance an umbrella on his shoulder as he made his written notes.
A crime scene photographer took pictures of the surrounding area, including the gravel road, the chain link fence and the nearby scrub, carefully noting the photograph number and each location.
After the dead woman had been photographed, Dacey measured and described the culvert in which she lay.
Once photos were taken, the branch could finally be removed from the body. Detectives West and Mansell watched as further injuries became obvious. The savage throat wound could be seen properly and the detectives counted at least six knife wounds to the woman’s chest, four deep cuts running from her breast to her navel and four running at right angles – forming the criss-cross pattern that they had seen earlier through the branch. There were cuts and abrasions to her face and the bridge of her nose was swollen enough to suggest it was broken. Her bra was caught up around her neck. Dacey photographed the body and collected the branch for evidence.
Six-and-a-half metres from the body was a tree with similar foliage to the branch and Dacey noted that the tree had a broken limb. He arranged photographs of the damage to the tree.
Homicide detectives arrived at 8pm and were briefed by Detective Mansell. They made their way over to view the body and speak to the other officers.
A couple of hours after he arrived, homicide detective Rob Hardie went around to Paterson Avenue to speak to the Websters. He told the couple that he couldn’t confirm it yet but to prepare themselves for the worst; on the strength of the evidence, it was probably Elizabeth they had found.
Angry at the frightening uncertainty they were enduring, Paul Webster asked why they couldn’t confirm it was Liz. Hardie gently explained that the identification couldn’t be made until the family identified the body. The distraught uncle fell silent. He had a fair idea that it was Liz. He had watched over his back fence which backed on to Lloyd Park and had seen the police cars, the SES lights and the police helicopter flying around. Neither he nor Rita had sat still for a minute since they had reported Liz missing. They had both been prowling like restless animals, unable to sleep, eat or rest.
They just didn’t want to believe it.
Another homicide detective, Sergeant Charlie Bezzina, cleared the crime scene at 11.35pm. In the appalling weather, crime scene examination was limited – visibility was poor and the area to be searched was best left to daylight hours. Police began packing away their equipment and a number of officers were given the duty of guarding the scene until the following morning.
Once