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Inside the Law. Vikki Petraitis
Читать онлайн.Название Inside the Law
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780648293729
Автор произведения Vikki Petraitis
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
‘There’s been a domestic argument,’ said Don Cameron, before beginning a long rambling explanation. Ashe reckoned it took Don about 10 minutes talking about family fights and family conferences before the police officer interrupted him.
‘Donald, exactly what are you trying to tell me?’
‘Um, it’s Beth,’ Don said, leaning over the counter and looking at Ashe. ‘I think she’s not well.’
It was a strange way of putting it.
Beth’s lifeless body lay on the floor of her bedroom in her family’s house in McFees Road, Rhyll. Don finally said as much to the police officer. ‘We were just at her place and she was lying on the floor with blood everywhere.’
Galvanised into action, Sergeant Ashe called detectives at the Wonthaggi Criminal Investigation Branch and told them to meet him at the McFees Road house. Ashe and one of his juniors from the station, Senior Constable Peter McHenry, drove behind Don Cameron and Ian Cairns to the house down the lonely country road where homes were secluded and set apart from each other.
A crime scene needed to be preserved. Ashe and McHenry were responsible for securing the scene and limiting entry. Even so, given the vague descriptions from Cairns and Cameron, Ashe thought it best to enter the house to make sure that the young woman inside was actually dead.
The sergeant walked carefully up the side driveway until he got to the back of the house – retracing the route that Don and Ian said they took earlier. He saw that both the screen door and the back door were slightly ajar. He opened them carefully and went inside; the house was dark and silent. It took only a couple of steps along the hallway to get to the first bedroom door.
Beth Barnard lay on the floor of the bedroom. Even though a quilt covered her from the nose down, Ashe could see her blue eyes, vacant and staring. A large pool of congealed blood on the carpet around her head made it obvious to the police officer that Beth was dead even though he could see no injuries.
Ashe carefully lifted a corner of the quilt and pulled it up and saw something that he would remember forever; the young woman’s throat had been sliced to the bone, nearly beheading her. In what was clearly a savage attack, a knife blow to her upper lip had smashed out one of her top front teeth. Ashe gently placed the quilt in its original position, and backed out of the room, shocked.
While Ashe was in the house, young Senior Constable Peter McHenry stood outside with Don and Ian. Not having seen the carnage inside, nor heard anything but a second-hand account on the drive from the police station, McHenry listened as Don and Ian laughed and chatted as they waited for Ashe to re-emerge.
McHenry didn’t think much of it at the time.
Ashe radioed detectives from the Homicide Squad; it would take them over an hour to get to the Island. Minutes later, three local CIB detectives arrived from Wonthaggi – Sergeant Ron Cooper, Senior Constable Alan (Jack) McFayden and Senior Detective Alan Lowe.
The house had officially become a crime scene.
Detective Jack McFayden was a no-nonsense country copper and when he wasn’t involved in the business of fighting crime, he loved nothing better than to hang a Gone Fishing sign on his door and disappear to his favourite fishing hole. He’d seen a lot of bodies in his long career, and it never got any easier.
As McFayden entered the house, he was conscious of the intrusion of a homicide investigation. He knew that the dead woman’s secrets would be poured over by the detectives, and her dignity and privacy would fall victim to the urgency of catching whoever killed her.
While the body on the floor gave a chilling aspect to the bedroom, the rest of it was achingly normal. Two single beds flanked opposite walls, piles of discarded clothes lay around, and stuffed animals fought for space on top of the chest-of-drawers with photos and bottles of perfume. Next to the clutter were some cold and flu tablets and a bottle of cough medicine. There was also a glass of water and some pain-killers. One of the beds was unmade, while the other was ruffled and blood-stained.
McFayden took in the bedroom and its contents and made a cursory search of the rest of the house – just in case there were further victims. But everything else seemed in order and there was no sign that the struggle had continued anywhere else, although there was some blood around the bathroom taps. Perhaps the killer had washed afterwards.
Back into the bright September day, McFayden noticed a couple of drops of blood on the concrete path outside the back door. Did that mean that the killer was injured as well? At this early stage, everything was mere conjecture.
First things first. Jack McFayden went with Ian Cairns and Donald Cameron to the police station where he would take their statements. He wanted to know how the two farmers came to discover the young woman’s body. From their initial conversations, it seemed Beth was a friend of their family. It also seemed that she had been having an affair with Don Cameron’s brother, Fergus.
While local cops stood outside guarding the crime scene, Beth’s body lay undisturbed inside. She would not be moved until the crime scene had been fully examined and processed.
Having made the drive from Melbourne, Homicide detectives Rory O’Connor and Garry Hunter arrived on Phillip Island. In their wake, came crime scene examiners Sergeant Hughie Peters and Senior Constable Brian Gamble along with a police photographer and fingerprint expert to examine the house to try and make sense of what had occurred.
O’Connor and Hunter got the gist of the story from Don and Ian.
The previous evening, Fergus had apparently admitted to his wife Vivienne that he was having an affair with Beth. Vivienne and Fergus fought, and Vivienne had stabbed her husband with a broken wine glass, then taken him to the hospital to get stitched up. Ian Cairns, who was married to Fergus’ sister, Marnie, said that Fergus had spent the rest of the night at their farm just up the road from his. Don Cameron said that Vivienne had called friends in the middle of the night, after she’d dropped Fergus at Marnie and Ian’s, and asked them to come and collect her two young boys.
According to Don and Ian, the family hadn’t known about this until the babysitter rang them earlier that morning to ask what she should do with the children since she had to go to work. It was then that they realised that both Vivienne and the family’s Toyota Land Cruiser were missing.
And so, right from the get-go, the suggestion was that Vivienne rang the babysitter in the middle of the night, then drove out to Beth’s place and killed her. And there was something the Homicide detectives were about to discover that would add weight to that theory.
In the bedroom of the dead woman, Cliff Ashe and Jack McFayden had lifted the doona just enough to see the vicious wounds to Beth’s throat. It wasn’t until Rory O’Connor, and Garry Hunter lifted the doona off completely that they saw something they could hardly fathom.
Carved deeply and clearly into Beth’s chest and abdomen, was a giant letter ‘A’.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850, told the story of a woman called Hester Prynne who was censured by her Puritan community for having a child out of wedlock. Her punishment was to wear a scarlet letter – A for adulteress – on all her clothing.
Did the A carved into Beth’s chest brand her an adulteress?
And if that was the case, who would have more reason to do so than Vivienne Cameron?
It was the job of crime scene examiners Sergeant Hughie Peters and Senior Constable Brian Gamble to examine the house for evidence. While