Networked Knowledge - Debi Marshall Reports

[This edited version of the report has been prepared by Dr Robert N Moles]

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Bob Moles: A state of Injustice - book now online
Bob Moles: Losing Their Grip - The Case of Henry Keogh - book now online

On 23 September 2009 Debi Marshall in the Australian reported “Mad, or plain evil”.

Forty years have passed since Derek Percy, then a cold, emotionless 20-year-old Australian navy sailor with a high IQ and overwhelming compulsions to hurt children, escaped the hangman's noose with a sentence in Victoria's Supreme Court of not guilty by reason of insanity.

Detained at the governor's pleasure, his crime, the abduction, torture and murder of 12-year-old Yvonne Tuohy, whose savagely mutilated body was found off a bush track at Victoria's Westernport Bay the day that man first walked on the moon, July 21, 1969, was deemed so heinous and depraved that the jury, confronted with the horrific evidence, reasoned no sane man could have committed such an act.

For 40 years, Percy has confounded the best psychiatric minds in the country with his blank refusal to undergo any treatment. The best that psychiatrists can offer is that his unsavoury fetishes and deviant fantasies involving the infliction of pain on several children of both sexes, described in journals that were later found in a Melbourne warehouse, indicate he is a sadistic sexual psychopath with pedophilic inclinations. It is a case so aberrant that a person of such pathology is seen perhaps once a decade.

Within days of his arrest, police were questioning whether Percy, who frequently travelled with his family on caravan trips, visited his grandmother's house in NSW on holidays and who joined the navy, aged 19, in late 1967, living and moving between ports, is Australia's most prolific child serial killer.

Was he, they asked, responsible for the shocking mutilation murders of 15-year-old friends Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock at Wanda Beach, Sydney, in January 1965? Did he abduct the three Beaumont children, aged four, seven and nine, from Glenelg beach, Adelaide, on a blistering Australia Day weekend in January 1966?

Was he the person who hogtied and killed Alan Redston, 6, in Canberra later the same year? Did he lure Simon Brook, 3, from his front yard in Sydney in May 1968, inflicting on the toddler identical tortures detailed in his diaries? Was he the thin-faced man who matched witness descriptions of the person seen walking away from Melbourne's St Kilda pier with Linda Stilwell, 7, in August 1968?

The day of the Tuohy murder, Percy also tried to abduct her friend Shane Spiller, 11, who instead ran for his life, and for help. Through the years, other children have come forward to tell police that they are certain Percy also tried to abduct them.

At the time of each murder or abduction, all from beachside areas, police ascertained that Percy was in the vicinity of the crime or had the opportunity and means to be there.

Incriminating suggestions that he was near crime scenes, including highlighted road maps, were also found at his arrest.

Although many police officers regard Redston's death as a possible misadventure, injuries to the other victims whose mutilated bodies have been found (Schmidt, Sharrock and Brook) are consistent with those sustained by Tuohy. The other four children, that is the Beaumonts and Stilwell, have simply vanished. Only the recovery of their bodies (their desperate families have fervently prayed forthe opportunity to give these children a decent burial) could offer some clues to the killer's warped psyche and, hopefully, to the culprit's identity.

Through all his years in custody, Percy, a model prisoner, has maintained an enigmatic silence with his jailers and psychiatrists. "I may have, but I can't remember," is his petulant mantra when confronted with questions about whether he has abducted and murdered other children. Naval colleagues nicknamed Percy the Ghost, the Spook and the Phantom for his unnerving ability to disappear in a crowd: a weird loner with a fetish for knives.

Former detective Bernie Delaney, one of several police officers who arrested Percy at HMAS Cerberus naval base when he was washing Tuohy's blood off his clothes, recalls he has never encountered a similar killer. Delaney escorted Percy to the desolate crime scene and is not frugal with adjectives in describing him. "He's cunning, predatory and very, very dangerous," he says. "What was done to the poor Tuohy girl was so pitiless that there is no doubt in my mind that he has murdered and abducted other kiddies. In 1969 he was at the top of his game. But part of Percy's power andcontrol lies in keeping his secrets. He is a pure psychopath."

Born in Strathfield, NSW, in September 1948 to Elaine and Ernie Percy, he was the oldest of four boys, one of whom died, aged 10 months, when Derek was seven years old. By 1961, the outwardly normal, middle-class family had shifted to alpine country at Victoria's Mt Beauty, where Ernie Percy, an emotionally distant father, worked at the state electricity commission hydro plant. But within two years the small community was awash with rumours about the strange behaviour of 14-year-old Derek, a bright student with an awkward, lonely personality.

Derek Percy, it was whispered, was the town snowdropper and also responsible for the theft and bizarre mutilation of neighbours' dolls. In 1964, witnesses reported seeing him prancing around in a negligee and wildly slashing women's underwear. When rumours of his son's shenanigans reached Ernie Percy's ears, his response was to threaten his workers with the sack if they repeated the allegations.

The Percy parents fiercely protected their family name and reputation; psychiatrists could only guess at the possible causes of Derek's deviant behaviour. What was not at issue was that from early adolescence, he clearly needed urgent help. By 1965, the year the Wanda Beach victims were murdered, Derek Percy, a former prefect, inexplicably failed his leaving certificate.

In 1966 the family moved to Khancoban in NSW. There, a sexual assault on two six-year-old girls in a caravan provoked a demand from the girls' parents that he see the town doctor. There was no follow-up, but Elaine Percy, later described by police as a controlling matriarch, watched her oldest boy like a hawk. Tragically, it wasn't enough.

In his recent five-year review Derek Percy, now 60, and described by one prison officer as "Australia's answer to Hannibal Lecter", finally agreed to undergo treatment. But those who have had dealings with him, including former and present police officers, psychiatrists and lawyers, strongly advise caution about any relaxation of security arrangements.

Percy's lawyer, Paul Higham, argued at the review hearing that his client, the longest serving prisoner in Victoria who has not been convicted of a crime, now wishes to be moved to another facility for treatment; but experts from Melbourne's Thomas Embling psychiatric hospital warn that he remains at risk of murdering children if he is ever freed.

Thomas Embling psychiatrist Douglas Bell told the court he was concerned that if Percy saw children visiting other patients, this could fuel his fantasies. Monash University's professor of clinical forensic psychology James Ogloff also says he does not believe Percy's dreams of violent crime have disappeared, and that although he is not mentally ill, he has an abnormal personality marked by his sadistic pedophilia. Chillingly, Ogloff adds that it could be years before any treatment works, if it works at all.

No one has been more vocal in their outcry against Percy's possible move to another facility than the families of his other possible victims. Linda Stilwell's brother Gary has flown to Melbourne from his home in Perth to hear the final submissions before the judge, Philip Cummins, on whether Percy has been successful in his bid to be transferred from Melbourne's Port Phillip Prison to a psychiatric facility.

Gary Stilwell wants to eyeball the man who he believes abducted and murdered his spirited sister. "If this animal managed to escape, God help other children," he says. "In my opinion, Percy agreeing to treatment is just a ruse to get him out of prison to a less secure environment and towards eventual release."

In 2004, a multi-jurisdictional agency was formed to investigate Percy's possible involvement in other child crimes in four Australian states. In 2007, following a finding at the second coronial inquest into Brook's murder that there were reasonable grounds to convict a known person for murder, the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions ruled that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges. Later that year, Brook's elderly parents watched in dismay as police raided a Melbourne warehouse where they found 35 boxes of Percy's belongings, including pornographic writings and drawings, which he had managed to store outside prison. It remains to be explained how this was achieved.

The weighty decision on Percy's future has fallen to Cummins, a former chairman of the Victorian Bar and a judge for 21 years. A fair man known to be critical of shortcomings in the justice system, Cummins has presided over some of Victoria's most celebrated cases, including the trial of Robert Farquharson, convicted of the murder of his three children on Father's Day 2005.

His decision on Percy, coinciding with recent shocking revelations of child kidnapping and pedophilia in Australia and overseas, will be anxiously awaited.

One person who will not be in court today is Spiller, Tuohy's brave friend who alerted police to her abduction and who noticed the navy sticker on the side of the culprit's car that led to Percy's arrest.

Haunted by his inability to save Tuohy and by fears that Percy would one day escape from prison and find him, Spiller's adult life was ruined by drug abuse and heavy drinking. His pronouncement that "I don't think I will ever forget him", after he pointed Percy out at a police identification parade, proved prophetic.

An inquest into Spiller's disappearance seven years ago is likely to find he committed suicide or died of a drug overdose. Either way, as a police officer who knew him noted, "Shane was undoubtedly another victim of Derek Percy."

Psychiatrists believe Percy is no longer insane, if indeed he ever was. Which leads to the question: If he is moved to another facility to start treatment, will he drop his vague, repeated assertions that "I may have, but I don't remember" when asked about his possible involvement in other child crimes and therefore jeopardise any chance of future release? If Percy, the Ghost, the Spook, the Phantom, does know where the bodies are buried, will he ever admit it?

Debi Marshall is author of Lambs to the Slaughter: Inside the Depraved Mind of Child Killer Derek Ernest Percy (Random House).

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