Why were detectives so dismissive of witnesses so willing to cooperate with their immediate investigation into the Easy Street murders.

Why didn't they insist on interviewing seventy two year old ladders commentry straight away?

And why not follow up with Peter Seller's and has made ray for that matter as soon as they could?

And how hard would it have been to cross the street to have a chat with Christina For tourists with the hindsight of forty seven years especially, it makes no sense.

But the late Brian Murphy maintained that the detectives seemed to have ignored.

What was right in front of them to be quite unserted.

I don't like to bag the blokes homicide squad.

I've already given the indecent pay.

But fail you to search, failure to find, and that's what the name of the game is.

And TIL encourage every person to speak to and be nice to them, because you don't know how you're going to use and you don't know what they're going to tell you.

People think that it's easy, but most homicides are solved by the average policemen being told these.

The only possible explanation for this lack of attention to detail is that not long after entering the house in Collingwood, investigators believed they knew who committed the double homicide, and so they disregarded pretty much everything else.

Right from the start, they had two serious suspects in their sites.

The first was Barry Woodard, who'd taken Susanne and young Gregory out the weekend before.

He told police that he and his brother went into the house on the Wednesday night and left the note under the ashtray in the kitchen because he'd been concerned that he hadn't heard from her for a couple of days.

Obviously, this made him the first person to look at The second was crime reporter John Grant.

Initially two the crime scene itself seemed to provide police with useful evidence.

The blood all through the house, the note in the kitchen, the footprint on Susan Bartlett's bed cover.

PETERH.

Hiscock, one of the first detectives to arrive at Easy Street, recalls being confronted with a conflicting tableau.

On the one hand, there seemed to be much to work with.

On the other, they were already on the back foot.

Those first initial thirty six forty eight hours are so important to investigators.

But don't forget we'd lost three days.

And it's so easy for people to be criticizing or whatever.

But you've got to put yourself back in the time where it was.

Take your mind back, close your eyes and think back.

Oh, no mobile phones, no cameras, no vic roads, lots and lots of things that you use.

Now people be tracked with their credit cards.

So the tools that you had were good old fashioned shoe leather, knock on doors, ask questions and make observations.

I mean, we were taught the ABC, which is assume nothing, believe no one or anything, and check, check, check.

So that's all we could do in those days.

So that's what he and Detective Graham McDonald tried to do in Collingwood on January thirteenth, nineteen seventy seven.

He and his partner hit the streets check, check, checking, Rayam and.

I Sacksville easy kill.

I can still remember.

We were up and down these three streets, knocking on doors.

We thought we could solve this one very quickly.

Such a horrific crime like that someone known.

We thought something someone was going to see something, someone would see something.

But nothing came from these door knocks.

Yet there was something inside the house that helped them quickly form a view about possible suspects.

Evidence of what the murderer did after he'd killed Susan and Suzanne.

The killer's blood in the bathroom especially led them to believe that he knew something about police procedure and was trying to get rid of the women's blood from his own body and his clothes, as well as clean himself up before leaving the house.

Never have I seen it, but to stand in a bath and wash the blood down from such a horrific crime was so so unusual to us.

That person was absolutely animal cunning to do that was just to cover himself up, because he obviously was going to go somewhere and he might be seen with all his blood on him.

So we got the old bath and pulled apart, and in the elbow where the water drains out was fragments of bone which had come off the knife or his clothing.

And I could not help thinking that this person knows something about investigations.

Now, it's not something that I would have thought of.

I'd have done that, but that time, who knows what you think put yourself in that position, but someone knew they had to remove the evidence from themselves.

I mean the perfect murder.

You could say someone could commit the perfect murder, then destroy all the clothing that they were wearing, all the shoes, any all the evidence, and then say nothing.

It'd be very hard to get home on those investigations in those days.

And that's fitted someone who writes about it thinks about it, attends murder scenes had been near other murder scenes.

For PETERH.

Hiscock, this was a pretty good description of crime journal John Grant, he wrote for Truth, consorted with crooks crimson coppers on the tough old police rounds to get the kind of yarns that Melbourne knocked the door down Tabloid demanded.

Nicknamed Grunter, his work was well known to the detectives who descended on Easy Street that January morning in nineteen seventy seven.

What made them even more focused on the fact that he'd slept on the couch next door was that they knew it was the second time he was so close to such a terrible crime, unbelievable as it still seems.

Just eighteen months earlier, Grant and two other men had been with nineteen year old Julianne Garcius Slay the night she disappeared from her apartment in North Melbourne.

The young American has never been seen since, nor has body been found.

For John Grant.

It was an unlikely coincidence.

The detectives on the case couldn't ignore.

What we used to say, with these long, difficult investigations, the answer is always in the file.

However, it does not seem to be in the file of this case.

I mean myself personally, I had probably one very good suspect.

He's been subject of DNA twice in the last several years.

This is John Grant, so he.

Was top of the list as far as me personally was concerned.

Of course, he wasn't alone.

Many of Peterhiscock's colleagues shared the same view.

Even though an official list of eight suspects had been compiled by the homicide team for the next twenty years, John Grant was widely believed to be their chief person of interest.

He always denied it, but that never stopped his journalistic colleagues openly discussing it for years.

I know I was one of them, well, I didn't know John at all.

I remember those conversations in which workmates would speculate about the sort of guy he was, the work he did, that kind of thing.

Many believed it was just a question of time before he was arrested, even if they, like me, didn't know anything much about the case at all.

Yet, someone who's always maintained John Grant's lack of involvement is one of the two people he was with the Knight of the Murders his former colleague Alona Stevens.

She respected him professionally and in a way felt sorry for him.

He was actually quite a talented journalist.

He was a bit younger than me and we were just colleagues and we all had a drink after work together.

Just knew him as a colleague.

He was fun, he was driven and dedicated.

He was really good at crime.

He could get information for nothing out of nobody and make something of it.

He was a real disciple of the genre.

Whereas you know, we're always sports people just sat around having a good time, he was actually out there doing a real job.

Alona left work with a group of colleagues, including Grant, that Monday afternoon in January nineteen seventy seven and went for a drink at the Celtic Club, a favorite journo's haunt at the time.

Well, we'd all gone for a bit of a drink, as was our habit, and because he had no car, I had my car.

We'd all been having a good time, and I said, look, why don't you just crash at my place?

I didn't live far away, so he came home with me.

We had a couple more drinks, waited for my flatmate to come home.

She and her partner had a restaurant, so late in the night, made a bit up for him on the couch and off we all went to bed.

You made a bet up for him on the couch?

Why because he was a bit pissed.

Well, he was pissed.

And secondly, it was only a two bedroom house, so I had my room, Janet had her room, and he had to sleep on the couch.

No, I just wondered that you were worried about him going home.

Oh yeah, I mean it was way too late.

I'm not sure that him the trains would have been running then, so I just said, look, stay here and we'll figure it out in the morning.

So sorry, just again, what time was it.

Oh, it was late at night, early morning.

Yeah, late night, early morning.

What happens then?

Do you remember anything from that night?

He just slept through the night.

Yeah.

We all just got up in the morning, one, two, three, into the in and out of the bathroom and off we went.

It was perfectly normal.

He was still on the couch when I got up.

Janet was always a late riser because she worked really hard in the restaurant.

Do you remember what time he did get up?

No, sorry I don't, but it would have been normal.

And what was his demeanor when he woke up?

When you got him up and got him moving because you ended up taking him home.

Yeah, he had a headache, like like me, so you know, his demeanor was, well, I better get home now, as we know.

Two days after driving him home that Tuesday morning, Alona found Susan and Suzanne's bodies in the house next door.

She's still astonished that so many people regarded John Grant as a suspect in the double homicide.

I was absolutely flabbagasted because for starters that I mean, they didn't never ask me about him, but you know, and I knew where he'd been.

I mean, okay, I hadn't been beside him all night, but blind Freddie could have seen that there was no evidence to support that he had done anything.

Did you ever talk to him about it?

No, not that I recall, because there was you know, it was pretty intense at the time, and I left the truth shortly after that to go to the age to work, and I really never spoke to him again because he had a crime beat and I was in Sport.

I guess we just all moved on with our lives and he must have known he wasn't guilty.

I knew he wasn't guilty, so we didn't pursue it.

Did you ever look at him differently after that?

No?

I always really felt rather bad because I mean, what are the odds that this is going to happen to you?

You know, I don't good and hold an opinion on what happened to the young girl in North Melbourne, but this, to have this happen eighteen months later must have been the most terrible thing for him to actually live with, to actually have to have to bear, plus all the staring and the finger pointing and the police harassing it well as good as harassing him.

I think he's had a really raw deal and had a lot of bad luck.

For the record, John Grant declined to be interviewed for this podcast, just as he did when I was writing the book about the case.

Andrew Rule was also a young reporter back in those days, now one of Australia's most prolific crime journalists and successful authors.

He remembers Grant well and had a pertinent conversation about him with a homicide veteran.

I had this conversation with a former head of the homicide squad, probably twenty five or thirty years ago, and when Eezy Street was already a big and soft case, and it might have been in the late eighties that I had this conversation and this homicide man, former head of the squad, he said, yeah, I can see why everybody thought it was John Grant, a truth journalist for various reasons.

He said, we did too, and let me tell you.

We got him into Russell Street and we had him in there for I think he said twenty four hours, but you know, all day and all night or something.

And he, without giving me details, he led me to believe that he was interrogated very thoroughly and that clearly he didn't know any more than he told them.

He was a knock about journo certainly was he ran.

When you work for truth, you had to mix with coppers and crooks and all sorts of colorful people because that was where you got your stories.

A lot of journals do that, including me, so you wouldn't automatically hang him for that.

But he was a hard edged truth crime reporter.

He did knock around with some very hard people.

And as you know, and some people know, he had the bad luck to be involved with a couple of guys who were the last to see alive.

A young woman who vanished in Melbourne earlier before Easy Street, and that is the mysterious case of Julie Garcia Slay.

Julie Garcia Lay came from I think California.

She was an American citizen.

She came to Australia, very young woman, probably nineteen.

She's come out here.

She's working at the Australian Newspaper, which was then in the same building as Truth up in La Trope Street.

And she was known for that reason too, people like John Grandain, many other journals, and she happened, you know, she was invited on a Friday night or whatever, to a party or a drink or whatever with a few people, and the last to see her alive, it would appear, were a couple of very bad citizens, one being John Joseph Powell and by chance, John Grant.

Now this coincidence is probably the thing, and it probably is a coincidence.

This is probably what has focused the police's attention on John Grant so thoroughly.

It just makes all of us think, Gee, that's a long, difficult coincidence.

But there's never been a scaeric of evidence against him.

You can be unlucky if you're mixing certain circles, and John Grant certainly ran in those circles.

Peter Hiscock still shakes his head at this particular happenstance, but he's come to terms with what Grant always maintained.

He wasn't the killer.

I have to believe John Grant absolutely extraordinary.

But again, you could have a whiteboard sometimes of investigations where because something looks to be unusual doesn't mean to say that it is so that looked unusual.

All those things led in one direction.

But of course, again he would have been delighted that DNA had been invented.

He'd be delighted that had been upgraded and he's been cleared.

But if you had a whiteboard and we had forty experienced people down in a classroom looking at this, I guarantee you that most people would have pointed with all those points I was pointing out to you, and there's other things that I'm not going to go into, but you would have said, right, it's guying.

Might be the person we need to look at.

Barry Woodard, one of the two men who entered the murder house the night before the women's bodies were discovered, was the other suspect on the homicide team's initial list, but he didn't have to wait so long to be cleared.

Police quickly accepted the then thirty one year old sheerer's alibi and his insistence that he and his brother hadn't noticed anything wrong when they visited one four seven Easy Street and left a note for Suzanne.

Woodard also declined to talk with me when I was writing Murder on Easy Street, and did so again recently when I rang to let him know I was working on this podcast.

But let's not forget that while the Woodard brothers were in the house, on Wednesday night, January twelfth, a new friend of Susan's had already climbed in through her bedroom window via the service lane.

The night before, one of the fellows who just met them climbed in as a footprint that was on the bed, and they got in.

Been trying to ring the girls and thought they might add the wrong number, and then set they climbed back out once they checked the number.

Now you only had to turn your head to look down there, and you'd see what was their human nature?

Can look around.

I've been trying to ring these girls.

I want to get hold you're just going to go and check the number and not so if they're there.

Also the young Gregor who's still there.

Whether he's winpling or whatever, we won't ever know.

But I mean he's certainly had no food, He never had any drink, He had nothing, His nappies were soiled, his bed, all that sort of stuff.

To this day, I don't believe this guy.

I didn't believe him then, I don't believe him.

Now you've gone in there, Well you've actually gone in through a window which has sort of broken in, climbed in over it's bed and gone looked at the phone number and not look back.

We thought we're going to solve this pretty quickly, but.

No, huh.

He's never been named publicly, but he was a tobacco salesman and, as Peter Hiscock says, went round to the house after the phone kept ringing out on the numerous times he tried to call Susan.

Fortunately he had a friend with him who led him up through the window.

He also went straight to police when he saw the double homicide reported in the Herald on Thursday afternoon, January thirteen.

They clearly believed he had nothing crucial to add in terms of detail.

He was even allowed to leave the country before the coroner's inquest into the murders on July twelve, nineteen seventy seven.

But somehow, nearly fifty years later, the fact that three men entered the house where two women's bodies lay seems even harder to grasp.

Can we really believe that this first visitor walked through Susan's unlit bedroom into the hall, turned right and right again to enter the laundroom to check the phone on the wall without seeing her.

Perhaps harder to imagine is this guy walking back into the corridor to retrace his steps out of the house through her bedroom window.

This means that for a few seconds at least he was facing Susan on the floor at the other end of that corridor, and was also close to the next bedroom, where sixteen month old greg Armstrong was in his cot Could he really not see Susan's body so close to the front door or hear Gregory.

Had he seen her and called police, significant time would have been saved.

The young women had been killed the night before, so police would have had more to work with, but as it was, they weren't found until Thursday morning, so that crucial forty eight hour window had closed.

This still drives Peterhiscott quietly crazy, as does the fact that an ex police officer was also on the original list of suspects.

I'm not going to name him.

He was an ex policeman who had left the police force under a check and a situation involving women.

Was not charged, but giving the opportunity in those days to leave, and.

He did raping women, not quite but harassment.

I think probably I haven't got evid of that, but that was allegations.

So anyway, he was a plumber working on a roof not far away.

He would have seen Susan Armstrong was an attractive young lady, and as time went on, I think, well, this guy would be just the sort of guy he had the propensity to put to females.

If I don't book you, I'll come around to you.

That resonated in my mind and bubbled away.

When the million dollar reward came out.

I got back to Hounsld.

Mick Hughes, the boss there.

They looked out and they said, no, he's been eliminated again from DNA.

Can't tell me, said he's been eliminated.

Now after that, I've got nobody else.

Over the next year or so, as the case detectives have been so hopeful of slving quickly remained unsolved, they developed that list of eight official suspects.

It's never been released publicly, but it's not hard to work out who The first four on it were John Grant, the Woodard brothers, and the tobacco salesman.

Then there was the disgraced form of police officer, a so called champion sportsman eventually identified as a racing car driver, and another man detectives tracked down in Britain.

The final person of interest in this inauspicious group was a man who hailed from Country Victoria, specifically the Euroa Banella region, so he was known to both the Armstrong and Bartlett families.

In fact, early on, Sue's brother Martin and Suzanne's sister Gail told police he could be involved.

He'd gone out with Suzanne several years before she traveled overseas, was known to country police, and had been in Melbourne when the girls were killed.

His wife told me that a couple of days before their deaths, he and a friend had started drinking quote and he was getting angry unquote at his home in northern Victoria.

She said she left their house and drove to her parents place as fast as she could get the kids in the car.

By Monday, January tenth, her husband was reportedly drinking at a pub in Collingwood, a few blocks away from Easy Street.

His so called mistress at the time told Polis he was with her all that night in Fitzroy, a suburb away.

When his wife and I spoke in twenty seventeen, she was long separated from this man.

She wasn't sure he could have done something so violent as murder, but claimed he'd beaten her up before, and so she knew what he was capable of when he was drunk.

But DNA testing cleared him of the crime, as it did all eight men on Homicide's initial list of eight persons of interest.

This meant they were effectively back to where they started when they first walked into one four seven Easy Street, horrified by what had happened, but with no clear next step and no real suspect to follow.

This doesn't surprise Andrew Rule, senior columnist and presenter of the Life and Crimes podcast with The Herald's son.

He clearly recalls what the police force was like back in the mid nineteen seventies.

He was composed largely of not really well educated or very sophisticated men who had joined the police force, probably fairly young.

Their values and attitudes were shaped at the front bar and the footy club more than anywhere else, and are probably lagging behind some elements of society in their attitudes.

And all of that meant that when you had two young women in a house in Collingwood who had a lot of male visitors and the whole sort of permissive age thing, there would be a total tendency by a lot of those people to regard the victims as sort of or maybe second rate or not worthy of as consideration as if it was the governor's wife and daughter.

Well, that'd be much more serious, mind you.

That's human nature that applies today.

That still exists because we're human and that's the way we operate.

But it was more pronounced then than it is today, I think, and those young women, the tragedy of what happened to them, the poor investigation that followed, is reflected by the fact that I think there's only something like about twenty four sheets of paper in the file.

I know that various homicide detected since modern day ones have expressed to me privately their shock when they looked at the Easy Street file that it only had basically a few sheets of paper.

It was a Manila folder with a few sheets of paper.

Twenty four pages of information in the original file certainly doesn't sound like a solid, thorough investigation.

And when I looked at the official file from the coroner's office in twenty seventeen, it reflected this.

Inside a yellowing jacket, copies of witness statements looked like they'd been rifled through too many times.

By untrained hands over the decades.

Some pages had been shuffled together without any regard for proper sequence or even whether they fitted together.

Maybe this archival disarray was due to the file having been part of the public record for so many years, but most disturbing were the photos of Susan and Suzanne's bodies included in this crime dossier.

They deserve better.

When high profile detective Ron Iddalls became head of Victoria's first properly staff cold case unit in twenty eleven, he tried to bring new dignity as well as scrutiny to bear on the case.

He sifted through two hundred and eighty unsolved murders on the book since nineteen fifty and green lighted those he felt they could probably solve.

This included easy street colour coated green.

Due to the fact that there was DNA to work with, all eight persons of interest on the original list were retested.

Whether this was because of advances in DNA technology or problems with the first tests has never been made clear by police, but some thirty five people were DNA tested in total at that point, including the first eight, but there were no DNA matches for the seminal stains found on the carpet near Suzanne's body, let alone a face washer found away from the house by forensic scientist Henry Huggins the day after he first visited the crime scene.

This intrepid investigator went back and checked the manhole and road rains within two blocks of the house and amazingly found the washer, as well as a shawl.

It's hard to know if the face washer was used for DNA testing, given where it was found, it might have been too contaminated to be useful.

Certainly, not much was made of Henry Huggins's remarkable find or most of the exhibit items taken from the house.

According to the coronial file, These included a bloodstained tawel, scrapings from the passage wall, bed sheets, a pair of panties, a clock, fibers from a high chair, scrapings from the side of the bath, and two pieces of carpet.

Blood, hair, and nails were also taken from Sue and Suzanne, but apparently revealed no useful information.

The exhibit that mattered most was that small piece of carpet cut away from where Suzanne had lain, stained with seamen.

For all of us riveted by TV dramas like Cold Case and CSI.

DNA is supposed to be infallible forensically the key that unlocks that last door.

The bad guys, especially the really bad guys, aren't supposed to be able to evade its forensic reach.

In the end, this lies at the heart of the mystery surrounding this dreadful double murder.

Has science somehow got it wrong.

The police DNA sample is of seamen found in or around Sue Armstrong's body.

The assumption has always been naturally that this would probably be the killer, That the killer is a sort of a rapist sex killer.

Right, fair assumption.

But what if it's wrong.

What if the previous visitor who turned up at you know, eight thirty whatever and left at eight fifty five or nine fifteen.

What if it's his semen and that the killer is actually the jealous bloke who turns up a few minutes later.

That would turn this whole case upside down, because it means that the DNA samples are relevant because it's the wrong guy.

That would be an explanation.

I'm not saying it's totally likely, but it fits the facts.

Next time on the Easy Street murders, DNA is it's a living thing.

It didn't seem to be clear at the time about how deep the wounds were, how they actually died.

It's not something that lives on forever, and the savagery of it looks like it's something that's been planned