The Frankston Murders. Vikki Petraitis
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the police would have just told them to wait – after all, she was eighteen years old. Lewis just hoped for the phone call that would tell him that Elizabeth had arrived home safely.
But the call didn’t come.
At 7am when his shift ended, Lewis passed on the report to the officers arriving to work the day shift.
On Saturday morning, Paul and Rita Webster played the waiting game. Elizabeth still hadn’t returned and they frantically rang relatives to see if she had gone to visit one of them. When Rita Webster telephoned her boss and his wife to cancel a dinner date that evening, she explained they couldn’t make it because their niece was missing. As she spoke to the boss’s wife, her voice suddenly broke as a strong feeling came over her that she would never see Liz again.
Constable Sally Davis came on duty at 2.30pm as watch-house keeper at the Cranbourne police station. She checked the missing persons notice board and made herself familiar with the events surrounding the missing eighteen-year-old.
At 3.30pm she telephoned the Websters and learnt that Elizabeth still hadn’t come home. Paul Webster told her that he had found another photo of Liz, and the policewoman asked if he could bring it to the station. Paul arrived half an hour later with the photo.
Constable Davis tried to contact the TAFE library but received an answering machine reply. She arranged for police to visit Elizabeth’s younger sister in Brunswick.
Less than an hour later, Sally Davis answered a telephone call from a Frankston-area local who was at the Langwarrin football oval.
‘There’s been a body found,’ he told the young constable breathlessly.
‘Where?’ she asked grabbing a pen to take down the details.
‘In the track off the Langwarrin Sports Club off the Cranbourne-Frankston Road.’
Constable Davis wrote down the address and told him she would send the police, then she set the investigative wheels in motion by informing a divisional van crew and the duty sergeant of the possible body find. The sports club and football ovals were part of Lloyd Park – the Webster’s house on Paterson Avenue backed on to the huge reserve.
Barely 10 minutes after the news of the body find, Paul Webster rang the Cranbourne police station to tell officers that he had received a phone call from Liz’s younger sister who had spoken to Liz around five o’clock the previous afternoon to organise a shopping trip. While he was talking to one of the officers, Paul Webster overheard the discussion in the background about a body being found and then he heard one officer say, ‘I bet it is that girl.’
Paul Webster put his hand over the mouthpiece, turned to Rita and told her what he had heard. ‘I think they may have just found Liz’s body.’
There was nothing for the aunt and uncle to do but wait and pray that Paul was wrong; and the body was not that of their niece.
5
LLOYD PARK
On Saturday 12 June a Langwarrin father, Rod, had gone bowling with his children and then picked up some timber from Mitre 10 on the way home. In the afternoon his wife Cheryl, who was having a dinner party that evening, sent him out to do some shopping. When he returned, Cheryl had one more job for him. As the party theme was a mid-year Christmas party, she asked him to get a small pine branch from Lloyd Park to decorate like a Christmas tree.
Rod drove around to the football oval near their house, reversed his car near the netball courts and got out to look for a suitable tree. He knew the layout of Lloyd Park because he took his children there for Vic Kick sessions most Sunday mornings. Heavy rain and hail had turned much of the surface of the oval into a quagmire and Rod tried to avoid the larger puddles as he wandered about. He spotted a pine tree a few metres into the scrub adjacent to the football field and while he was figuring out how to cut one of its branches, he glanced further into the bushes and saw what looked like a body.
He took a couple of tentative steps forward and saw a woman lying in a shallow depression with water around her lower body. He could make out that she was wearing runners and grey tracksuit pants. Although a branch covered the woman’s top half, Rod could see part of her face – there was dried blood underneath her nose as if she had had a nose bleed. It was obvious to him that she was dead.
The shocked man jumped back into his car and drove around to the sports club where he knew there would be a telephone. He ran in and asked John, the club’s barman, to call the police.
‘What’s the problem?’ John asked.
‘I’ve found a body,’ Rod said breathlessly. ‘Near the bend in the dirt track. There were a couple of trees down and that’s where the body is.’
The barman quickly telephoned the Cranbourne police station and spoke to Constable Sally Davis who answered the phone.
Davis told John and Rod to go and wait near the location for the police to arrive. The men made their way down the dirt track, where Rod pointed to where the body lay. They didn’t get too close, but John could also see the grey tracksuit pants and the runners, as well as a black watch band, on the dead woman’s left wrist.
‘How did you find it?’ John asked as they stood waiting for the police to arrive.
‘We’re having a dinner party and I was looking for a tree,’ Rod explained.
When Senior Constable Jeff Brennan and Constable Tamara Shauer arrived, Rod and John hurried over to meet them, then indicated where the body lay.
‘It’s over there in the scrub.’
The two police officers left their car near a heavy chain fence and approached the location, careful not to go too close to the body so as not to destroy any possible evidence. They had to ascertain first of all that the person was in fact dead and secondly whether or not the body find was suspicious. After all, it could have been someone walking through the bush who had suffered a heart attack.
The officers stood where the witnesses had stood, several metres away from where the woman lay. Senior Constable Brennan was quick to note the absence of clothing on her upper body; and the blood on her face. It certainly looked like she had met with foul play. They got close enough to see that the area would have to become an official crime scene.
Brennan directed Shauer to protect the area and stop anyone from getting too close, while he returned to the police car to radio D-24. Homicide, forensics and crime scene examiners would soon surround the scene to each perform their respective tasks.
Brennan also radioed his senior officer at Cranbourne, Sergeant Fred Barton. After twenty years in the force, Barton was used to body finds. Just as he was leaving the station, Sally Davis handed him the missing persons report and photograph of Elizabeth Stevens.
‘It could be her,’ she said.
During the afternoon, Sally Davis had kept him up to date on the status of the missing person report and she had told him earlier that she had a bad feeling about the missing student.
‘I don’t like this one, Sarge,’ she had said.
Sergeant Barton also had a feeling that the missing teenager had just been found. As he drove to Lloyd Park in the pouring rain, Barton knew that any evidence such as shoe impressions and blood would literally be washed away and he also knew that he would spend most of the night standing around in the rain co-ordinating traffic, media and the officers under his command. He glanced over at the thick black plastic raincoat on the seat beside him and hoped the rain would stop.
When he arrived at the scene, Barton donned his raincoat and positioned his police hat over his collar so that the rain ran down the back of the coat and not down his neck. He walked through the long grass over to the creek bed where the body lay, careful to walk the same path that the other two officers had taken so as not to contaminate the scene any more than was absolutely necessary.
Within three metres of the body, he noticed immediately that the dead woman bore a strong resemblance to the photograph he had of Elizabeth