Dr Helen Hewitt came outside to the van, unzipped the body bag and examined the young woman. She noted that her pupils were fixed and dilated, there were no heart sounds present, there was no evidence of respiration, and the body showed obvious early signs of rigor mortis.
Life was pronounced extinct fourteen minutes before midnight.
When Sergeant Steve Lewis came in at 11pm to work the night shift, he had slept most of the day and hadn’t seen the news. The watch house keeper gave him the update.
‘They found your girl. She’s dead.’
Lewis felt like he’d been hit. He immediately thought of the Websters and their grief and, not knowing the circumstances of Elizabeth’s death, he wondered if he could have done something to prevent it. Lewis knew that they hadn’t even checked Lloyd Park the night before; they had concentrated on the route between the TAFE college and the Webster’s home.
The inevitable ‘what if...’ question came to mind. What if he had driven around to Lloyd Park the night before, could he have somehow prevented the young woman’s death?
It would be weeks before he would learn that Elizabeth Stevens was dead hours before he took the report that she was missing.
At around 3am, Steve Lewis took one of the marked police cars and drove to Lloyd Park to relieve the police guarding the scene. They spoke briefly about the murder and Lewis heard that the victim’s throat had been cut.
By this time, the scene was almost clear of the earlier investigations and the command post bus had returned to the CFA station. He parked near the football oval and watched as the rain ran in intermit sheets down the windscreen. Lewis could see the fences of the houses bordering the park and he reflected that most of the families living there wouldn’t be touched by the death of a friendless eighteen-year-old girl.
Keeping his solitary vigil until daybreak, Lewis had hours to ponder the tragedy of the situation. He wondered who could have killed Elizabeth Stevens and why. The thought suddenly struck him that life plods along and then something like this happens that totally destroys one family’s security and happiness forever. Its rippling effect would spread and affect everyone who knew the young woman. They would have to come to terms with her death and the fact that some bastard had taken her life. He remembered how Rita Webster had told him that Elizabeth had swapped History for Australian Studies. Now she would never finish her course. She would never do anything again.
Her life had ended.
6
POST MORTEM
At around 1am, homicide detective Charlie Bezzina lodged the body at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, where it was placed in the secure and refrigerated storage area 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