TRUE CRIME: police hope a $6 million reward will help them catch a serial killer
It’s one of Australia’s biggest murder mysteries, unsolved for decades. Now police are offering a $6 million reward in a push to finally nail the serial killer. Sue Smethurst reports.
New mum Catherine Warnock was breastfeeding her baby son James when she heard the familiar refrain introducing the nightly news. It was November 22, 1981, the day of her 21st birthday, and she raced to the television, just as she’d done every day since her aunt
Joy Summers had vanished six weeks earlier. Each painstaking day, the Catholic family had prayed for a miracle, but as Cath cradled her tiny son in her arms, the familiar voice broke the news they dreaded: “The body of a woman has been found in a shallow grave…”
They knew instantly it was Joy. “It was the most horrible birthday present,” recalls Catherine, now 57. “We had nothing to celebrate that day.”
The discovery of Joy’s body, in scrubland near Frankston in Victoria, confirmed what police had feared: a serial killer was preying on women around Melbourne, stalking them, charming them and luring them to their deaths. Joy was one of six women murdered in a sickening killing spree between May 1980 and October 1981.
The Tynong North-Frankston murders, as they are known, shocked Australia and ended an age of innocence in carefree Melbourne, and today, almost four decades after the first body was found, they remain one of the country’s most baffling unsolved crimes.
“It was so awful, this was the sort of thing that happened to other people, in other places, not to our family and not in Melbourne,” says Catherine. “We were all devastated, especially Mum because Joy was her younger sister and they were close. Our only consolation was at least we’d found her.”
THREE BODIES FOUND
On a hot summer’s day, the normally quiet Brew Road in Tynong North, south-east of Melbourne, is bustling. Cars are lining up at the gates of the newly revamped Gumbuya World, and families and children are waiting excitedly to try their luck on the brand new mega waterslide at the popular family theme park. Tynong North is a pretty place, surrounded by natural bush, rolling green hills and valuable farmland. It’s peaceful and picturesque, a rural haven only three-quarters of an hour from the city.
But a dark shadow hangs eerily over this place, because it was just a stone’s throw from Gumbuya World, then famously known as Gumbuya Park, in December 1980 that the bodies of three women were found in scrub, giving the first hint that something and someone truly sinister was haunting Melbourne’s streets.
Victoria Police hope to lift that shadow once and for all. They have embarked on a comprehensive review of the Tynong case, starting from scratch, and late last year offered an unprecedented $6 million reward for information that may lead them to the killer or killers. Announcing the renewed focus on the cold case, the then head of the Homicide Squad, Detective Inspector Mick Hughes, said: “We’ve recently had some success in [rewards] for cold cases, and we are very keen to see this investigation resolved. We want that vital piece of information that will progress this case.
“Families are frustrated, and some very hard-working investigators have been very frustrated by not being able to progress this over
the years. There are a lot of teases [loose ends] in this case, a lot of little things that we think, ‘If I just knew a bit more about that, it might help us.’”
It’s been 38 years since the bodies of churchgoer Bertha Miller, 73, Catherine Headland, 14, and Ann-Marie Sargent, 18, were found buried separately in shallow graves near an old sand quarry off Brew Road in Tynong North. Bertha, who was the aunt of then Police Chief Mick Miller, went missing from a tram stop in Glen Iris. When her body was found, she was still wearing the thick grey woollen dress she’d put on to keep warm during the short walk to church.
Metres from Bertha’s grave, investigators uncovered the remains of teenagers Catherine and Ann-Marie, who were both naked.
Just months beforehand, 59-year-old mother-of-six Allison Rooke left home to catch a bus to go shopping and never returned. Her body was found in Frankston and initially treated as a separate murder until the body of Joy Summers was found in a similar Frankston location a year later. The body of the last of the victims, Narumol Stephenson, was found dumped on the side of road at Tynong North in February 1983; she had gone missing in November 1980. Police believe Allison was the killer’s first victim and they are convinced that all six are linked.
In each grisly find, police, forensic and medical experts could not establish a cause of death and personal items had been removed from the victims, perhaps to conceal their identities, perhaps to form part of a sick collection of trophies kept by a sadistic killer.
All six women vanished off busy Melbourne roads, either walking or waiting for public transport in broad daylight, and Detective Inspector Mick Hughes says this could hold the key to solving the case. “All of the victims were on foot, all using public transport. Someone, somehow, has been able to engage with them, and if we had the key to that, we could have the answers we’ve been looking for. All we need is one lead, one piece of information.”
One example of a possible lead is the mystery man whom Bertha Miller told friends she’d met at the tram stop on her way to church, two weeks before she died. Bertha, a pious Christian who took every opportunity to spread the good word of the Lord, said the man had taken an interest in the Bible she was carrying. Police have never found this man.
The murders sparked a wave of fear across the city and an intense manhunt ensued at the time. Newspapers ran headlines such as “Mass killer could be on the loose”, claiming the perpetrator could be the “greatest mass killer in the nation’s history”.
Police were inundated with information, including a series of chilling, anonymous letters with intimate details about two of the murdered women. “You are dealing with mass murder on a scale never seen in this country,” one read. While another, a Christmas card sent to the mother of one of the murdered girls, boasted inside knowledge. The author signed off: “P.S. I’ll keep in touch some time in the New Year.”
At first, police were convinced these were legitimately from the killer, taunting them, but they later proved to be a hoax, hampering the early investigation. Over the years, dozens of detectives have worked on this case. There have been several separate homicide investigations, a specially formed taskforce, Operation Lyndhurst, and expert FBI profilers from the US and Canada were called in. Police have painstakingly interviewed 2000 people and filed more than 11,500 pages of notes. The investigations have narrowed down a
“None of these women deserved to die this way, and we want answers. Somebody knows something.”
number of key suspects, including Harold Janman, a devout churchgoer who has been a person of interest from the beginning.
Janman has publicly acknowledged he is the prime suspect but repeatedly protested his innocence. He had lived in the Tynong area and worked as a truck driver; his route took him along Brew Road delivering to the quarry near where Bertha, Catherine and Ann-Marie were found. He’d also worked as a projectionist and was known to regularly offer women lifts in his car – he admitted to doing so along the Frankston-Dandenong Road where the bodies of Allison and Joy were found. Coincidentally, the murders stopped after Janman was first interviewed by police on December 3, 1981. He later failed two police polygraph tests. No charges have ever been laid.
“We are going into this case again with a totally open mind and will conduct our review with good-old fashioned policing. There were a number of suspects at the time, we are not satisfied that any of them can be excluded,” said Detective Inspector Hughes.
He was at pains to point out that with the historic reward comes confidentiality and the potential for police to offer special support, perhaps even immunity from prosecution, to a witness who can provide the vital
information that solves the case. If someone had taken a minor role, for example, providing a vehicle, or an alibi after the fact, we would approach the Director of Public Prosecutions for consideration. Over time situations change, someone who may have felt threatened by this person back then, may not feel that way now, relationships change, that’s how we’ll progress this case.”
Catherine Warnock believes her aunt may have been familiar with her killer. Although she was living in Frankston at the time she died, at one stage Joy had lived in Glen Iris, and she wonders if she had a connection to Bertha Miller. There are many questions which she hopes will one day have answers.
“It’s always struck me; Aunty Joy was an intelligent woman, she had a good job as a stenographer, she was well spoken and quite worldly, she’d lived in the city and made her way around on her own, she was independent and knew how to protect herself. I can’t imagine she’d ever get into a car with a complete stranger, so I’ve often wondered maybe this was someone she’d had contact with.”
Family members of victims, friends, children, nieces and nephews have painfully relived the loss of their loved ones over and over again during the past 38 years in an ongoing attempt to keep the case alive, and they will never give up their pursuit of justice. But as the offender is likely to be aged in his 70s or 80s now, time is running out.
“We appeal to people to think back, trawl their conscience, someone may have provided an alibi for someone they loved, maybe you were a child at the time and remember something strange happening at home, maybe you overheard a conversation? Now is the time to get it off your chest, free your own conscience and do what you know in your heart is the right thing,” Catherine says.
“Joy didn’t have children of her own, so I guess we all feel a responsibility to make sure she is remembered and not forgotten. We can’t bring Joy back, but good women don’t deserve to die this way, none of these women deserved to die this way, and we want answers. Somebody knows something, and it’s time the person who did this was held to account.”