The unsolved murders of Susanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett have been a dark constant in the lives of their families and friends for nearly five decades now.

But can justice still be achieved after all this time?

How long Canna Cole case continue to be investigated without success before investigator's attention and funding are reprioritized And at what point is such a decision made, if at all?

Then again, after forty seven years, is it time for a more significant legal intervention, perhaps a second coroner's inquest.

It's fair to say the first one into the Easy Street murders achieved nothing other than an official verdict that the two women had been fatally stabbed by person or persons unknown.

Only ten witnesses provided statements to Victoria's coroner, Harry Pasco, and as we know, he heard nothing at all from the three potential witnesses who lived in the street at the time of killings, Gladys Coventry, Peter Sellers and Christina for Tourists.

Now, some of those involved in this case believe a new coroner's inquiry should occur.

It only happens on rare occasions, but lawyers I've spoken to while researching this podcast suggest it might be the only way forward.

Many aren't too keen on talking about it publicly, but retired forensic pathologist Stephen Cordner, the eminent first director of the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, has no such qualms.

Occasionally, second inquests have produced useful results, and I think I'm not saying there hasn't been a second inquest in this case, and around about now probably getting to be about the end of the line if you don't have one now, and you're never going to have one because so much time has passed.

But I reckon there's a good case, given the seriousness of this matter for the families involved.

But this was a huge event for Melbourne, for Collingwood.

An easy street just carries with it all of this baggage.

You know.

It sounds to me like precisely the sort of event that a second inquest exists to try and help with.

And what have we got to lose some so it might flush something out, and including the possibility that somebody's been sitting on really important information for fifty years and for whatever reason, hasn't been sharing it.

Professor Cordner Honorary Professor in Forensic Pathology at Monash University remembers what happened at one four seven Easy Street vividly.

I think anybody who was sentient in Melbourne at those times has got Easy Street see it into their memories.

It seems to be certainly in my mind.

It's you know, it was the sort of thing that you didn't think could possibly happen in Melbourne, and I think upset people and made people feel less secure and less like we were living in you know, the wonderful country we thought we were, which we are of course, but it did alter things.

I think, yes, just thinking of that baby left there for three days, but two two young women, one a mother, if it happened today, it would rock the city as well.

There have been such improvements at being able to sort these things out where probably we're talking about a stranger.

Well you know, there are.

Arguments against it being a stranger, but let just for the moment, suppose that it was a stranger.

Police technology classe secuit TV DNA.

You know, microscopic faces can be detected and matched with something else, so that type of approach simply was not available at all in nine seventy seven, so I would think their success rate in those days with that sort of crime is very much less than it is today.

And of course these days you've got a public much more turned into and more effectively accessed by police to make their contribution to which doesn't seem to have been completely covered off in nineteen seventy seven.

Yet even with all these advances, there's still been no hit within Australia's national database.

So what does that tell us?

Well, the national database, as good as it is, isn't perfect.

There are different rules for getting your DNA onto the database for each state.

Each state has slightly different rules for taking samples from individuals to profile and then to add on to the DNA database.

And it's quite a complicated administrative process.

So you know, I think there are a few barriers to as comprehensive a DNA database that people probably think we have.

Having said that, I'm all in favor.

I can't really see any too many civil liberty objections to a proper DNA database myself.

So what does that say to us that it's not there?

Well, it doesn't really take us too far.

The one or more people, but probably one I think who was the murderer in this case has got away with it and hasn't been caught for anything else.

It doesn't mean that it didn't know other things.

You make the point though, in raising that question, that one possible answer is suicide.

So that is a possibility.

I mean, I think somebody who commits this sort of crime, if they have scaic of moral sense, then they're at risk of suicide because it just gnaws at them.

They're the type of person that can have done this, and really the only the only decent thing they can do if they're going to continue to live, is either to give themselves up or to commit suicide.

I know that there are murderers who.

Have who have done that, and it's sort of in an awful way, it's understandable.

So its possible this person has gone down that path.

This murderer, in which case set probably quite an effective way of covering effects.

Investigating this, of course, would be fraud.

Huge task because you know, I mean in Victoria alone, there's you know, more suicides into our Morod traffic fatalities, so you know, probably seven or eight hundred suicide of a year in Victoria and fifty years since Easy Street not quite so, that would be a huge task.

You would need.

To develop a list of possibilities and then that would be enormous.

Of course, you'd probably restrict yourself to the first decade after after therese murders.

There is a sort of as a sort of start.

You'd be struggling at this distance to get any DNA samples from those deaths because it's so long ago and samples wouldn't exist.

There could be family, that could could be family.

There could be family, but then you have to get more than you know, you have to get more than one family member probably to give you a sample.

It would be a very difficult conversation to have with a family of somebody who's suicided, Very very difficult.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the police authority to some extent gone down that path.

They would might necessarily announce to the world that they've done that.

But that's a place where occasional murderers have been found.

As we explore what should happen next in the Easy Street case, it's instructive to note the view of the senior forensic investigator who attended the crime scene that morning, Sergeant Henry Huggins from the Police Forensic Science Lab, was troubled by what confronted him.

Not only had two young women been brutally stabbed, but numerous police had been in and out of a house before he even arrived contaminating the scene.

Fresh from a crime scene course in the UK, Huggins knew this before he started examining that scene with his colleague, forensic biologist Mariam McBain.

One of the most obvious mistakes a detective had washed his hands in the bathroom.

Nevertheless, Sergeant Huggins and his colleagues collected as much evidence as they could without jumping to conclusions about what exactly had happened in the house.

No, that's dangerous to do.

Actually, yeah, No, you don't want to come to a conclusion into a place because you can make any theory fit any shene you like.

Yes, we can make it fit if you're not careful.

So bastually you go and say, I, actual, we've got one body there, noody here, that's still what we can find.

But I don't think at that stage I ever really came to an inclusion.

Well, I'd say it was pretty obvious that Amtal got killed before Bart well, certainly attacked, you know, but the amount of blood she lost in the carpet, in my life, I thought she was probably did i WM.

Henry Huggins passed away in twenty twenty two.

He was revered as a forensic scientist, investigating most major crime scenes in Victoria during his twenty six years with the police.

Those who knew and work with him will call his attention to detail, his commitment, and his thoughtfulness.

He certainly thought deeply about the Easy Streets more than forty years after attending that crime scene.

When I was working on my book Murder on Easy Street, we went through some of the investigator statements that had gone to the coroner in seventy seven.

He was immediately in the moment back in the little house in Collingwood and frustrated.

He worried that the police photographer hadn't captured all the images that were relevant in Suzanne's bedroom, that the seminal stains on sheets taken from the house probably hadn't been stored in Tony Raymond's special fridge, That he couldn't really work out the killer's sequence of attack.

For instance, he wondered if Sue had gone out that night only to come home and be confronted by the murderer.

But Gladys Coventry's interview with truth pos's new questions.

Of course, Henry Huggins never read her account of the tall man with dark hair she saw talking with Susan Bartlett early on January eleventh, nineteen seventy seven.

So did Sue actually unwittingly invite the killer in?

Or was another man outside the house waiting to come in when her guest left?

And why are the small glasses missus Coventry describes in the article not mentioned in the official list of exhibits presented to the coroner.

There were other details too that bothered Henry Huggins.

Will I find difficult with this is that we've got two blood grooms.

This is Armstrong's and Bartlett's.

From what I chance to do is find a reason for Armstrong being in the bathroom.

So her blood was in the bathroom, a blood vision on the washing machine, No, on the side of the bath.

So could that have been his one?

Well it's possible, but he is also away, so that is a possibility.

Well, otherwise I cannot see how she would be attacked in her bedroom and managed to get up to the up to the bassroom back again without spreading blood on the wad and the floor all the way.

Out and get back there.

Yeah, she did at one stage try and get to the phone.

Now, the phone is a bit of a mystery in the way because the phone acially liked there was blood on the young clock and up along the back of the room there there was no blood on the phone, and the phone was right in the corner in her bedroom.

The phone was in the part now.

Unfortunately, when the photographer took the photographs and you did around, he missed that vital corner unfortunately, so there's no photo showing the phone.

So they had two extensions.

It could have been.

I know there was one in the bedroom and arms from obviously tried to reach it over the beer.

So that wasn't his blood, that was her blood.

Well we don't know, as that is the problem we have.

But I feel that blood across there the sheets and over towards the top phone was an attempt to get to the phone.

I think, so many years later it was impossible to be sure.

But the retired forensic scientist was especially unimpressed by pathologist James McNamara's failure to identify the fatal stab were en suffered by the women.

See.

One of the difficulties here is that McNamara hasn't made any suggestion till whether any old though on their own, would have been faithful.

Matt the knife didn't they call?

You've heard that very I mean these days we'd have a lot more detail than have been a a diagram or each body as to where they are.

To be fair, Henry Huggins was critical of his own work too, insisting his official statement in nineteen seventy seven wouldn't make the grade now.

In an email to me in May twenty nineteen, he went further, looking back at my and Morham at Bain's statement, I am thinking that perhaps we were asked for short statements for the coroner to establish cause of death only as no person had been charged or was expected to be charged.

This meant a simple statement to assist in establishing cause of death.

This often happened just to get an inquest over.

In this note he also said that he just realized this was Maauram mcmain's first crime scene and that he quote should have gone over the scene in detail with it to ensure we had the right samples to test every theory we could come up with.

He also pointed out a mistake I'd made in the book by reporting that it entered number one four seven through the front door.

Where did you get the idea that I went in the front door?

I think that is very unlikely even in those days, and I noted that it was shut.

Henry Huggins was adamant this double murder would have been solved a decade later.

I'm sure if it had happened in eighty seven instead of seventy seven, it would have been solved, he wrote in his final email to me.

By then we had better blood and DNA analysis and better crime scene control.

Former pathologist Stephen Cordner isn't quite as convinced about this as Henry Huggins, but he has the highest regard for his work, in particular the way he investigated this double homicide.

Henry Huggins, I think this is huge testament to both his the way he thought.

He didn't only think he did, he acted.

He went out and looked in all the draines in the immediate vicinity, more than the immediate vicinity.

So that's huge task, but really good thinking.

I wouldn't think that had happened before.

Maybe that was the first time.

I don't know, But have you said in your book that he found a face washer.

He didn't only find a face washer.

He kept the face washer, made it an exhibit and tested it, and low and behold, found some semen on it, which I think asked to tell a story of you know, the And assuming that you'll tell me that the semen on the face washer was the same DNA has found on the carpet, well.

I don't know, that's never been that's never been made clear.

Let's assume that that's the case.

And we might be wrong about that, but there can't be too many face washers down raines with semen on them, and let alone within a short distance of a place where there's just been a sexual murder.

So let's suppose they're the same.

Then that start to tell the story of the sort of murderer we're dealing with.

There's someone who's thinking, who's cleaning and tidying themselves up and getting rid of the evidence.

And as I understand it, no knife has ever been found.

There are stories going there as a whole unclear.

Haven't wait to put on those stories, but there's you know, stories of a man being seen washing himself.

There's clear evidence that the bathroom has been used to wash himself in the bathroom, there's some suggestion that one of the bodies was cleaned up.

So this sounds like somebody who may be in their own psychiatrically disturbed, psychologically disturbed mind, but he's also functioning in a reasonably ordered way to cover his tracks.

So that, you know, makes me think that perhaps this person entered the house with this project, this murder in mind, and maybe you know, I thought he was going to be able to get away with just the one but then got disturbed and had to kill both women.

It really does look to me like this was this was somebody intent upon murder, and so that makes you think about whether this person has done it before and or afterwards.

Stephen Corner also has a telling perspective about what pathologist James McNamara was able to tell the coroner in nineteen seventy seven and what he couldn't.

I mean, when there's multiple stab worons because of death is bleeding from multiple stab word because they're all generally speaking happening at much the same time, and the bleeding is occurring from all of them.

Yes, the bleeding from the heart will be more substantial than the bleeding from the lung or the bleeding from soft tissue in the arm or something like that, And you can't say which order they happened, So a reasonable thing to say is multiple stab worins.

As doctor McNamara did, I think.

He probably would have said, if you'd ask him, why didn't you describe how much decomposition there was?

You would have said, oh, we talked photos so you can see for yourself, you know, And that's that's an answer.

But I think most reports would probably include a description of it as well.

But that was in the seventies and doctor McNamara wasn't actually attained pathologist, and that was the way the system sort of worked in those days.

And one of the reasons that the Victim in Authentic Medicine came into existence was to repair that sort of system.

In our last email exchange, the late Henry Huggins said that probably the bestly the police had four decades ago was a phone call to a prominent Melbourne journalist not long after the murders.

Senior columnist Teslawrence from The Herald newspaper was invited by police to visit Easy Street.

In fact, she wandered through the so called murder house as the two families were packing up the young women's belongings.

When her piece was published, she got an unnerving call at work from a man who peppered her with questions about what she'd written, as well as commenting on certain items in the house itself.

He was especially interested in the record, apparently an album on the stereo that he said she should have named.

Was he just a true crime nut or did the murderer actually call the journalist At the time, Tess Lawrence tried to get police to follow up the call, but had no idea how seriously they took the matter.

It's probably not surprising that she's called for an inquiry into their handling of the investigation overall.

Of course, detectives have had other leads to follow too.

In the decades since the death of Susan Bartlett and Suzanne Armstrong.

There were the letters sent to the Armstrong family by one Peter Collier, a man they didn't know.

He claimed to have been in a psychiatric hospital with a man he alleged was responsible for the girl's deaths, and over a period of three years, outlined his theory in detail and quite dignified old fashioned handwriting.

Certainly parts of his tale were true.

I was able to verify that he and Anthony Christie, the man he was implicating, had been treated at Larundel Hospital in nineteen seventy seven.

Collier was also well known in the bright region, where most of his correspondence was posted, and to be fair, his letters and postcards to Suzanne's Mamma Alene and her second husband, Bruce Curry, had an air of reason to them and a barely contained anger that the murderer hadn't been apprehended.

In the first letter, sent in two thousand and four, Peter Collier blamed this on what he described as the criminal negligence of the institution as well as the homicide squad.

Briefly, he claimed that Anthony Christi had been admitted to Larundel early in seventy seven in a coma that lasted ten days.

After he'd regained consciousness, Christie allegedly told two different therapy groups that he liked to carve up women after having sex with them.

Initially, the Armstrongs took Collier seriously enough to meet him at least once, and as well as writing to Suzanne's family, he also letter bombed Easy Street, putting flyers in mailboxes up and down the street that made similar claims about Larundel and the killer.

A couple of locals who still lived there hung on to them for years.

Aileen Curry, Suzanne's mother, also kept Collier's letters and cards.

Despite police dismissing the scenario that he suggested as having any bearing on the case, sister Gail still has them.

They said he was a looney and had done it before to other people, so who knows, She told me after a protracted email exchange, Victoria Police Media told me, quote, both Peter Collier and Anthony Christi have been investigated and eliminated unquote.

This was the same email in which I was told on October five, twenty twenty two, that investigators have also spoken to Gladys Coventry.

At that stage, we didn't know about her interview with Truth.

Police Media added that Peter Sellers will also be spoken to by investigators in the near future.

A couple of weeks later, Senior Detective Lee Prados did just that.

After forty five years and ten months Peter Sellers was finally interviewed about what he'd heard the night the two young women were murdered in his street.

He admits he felt a bit apprehensive when he arrived at cramb And Police station to meet the homicide investigator.

Not nervous, anxious maybe do you know what?

Of course, it's been so long and someone in authority wanted to talk to me, that was the main reason.

And yeah, once I started there, it was fine, and he was really good, really good.

Initially, of course he just said to me and he can't discuss, he can't lead it into a question.

I had to put forward in my own words.

And then you wanted to Then I explained about the book and the podcast is all coming up, and you wanted to know exactly what I'm saying today is exactly what I put in the book in the podcast.

I said yes.

Once they got into the swing of things, Peter relaxed and his memory certainly didn't fail him.

Though the interview took three hours to document.

I proceeded tell a story, but then every now and again he stopped and he typed some more, then asked me like a question on the question.

So he's not recording it as far as you know, he's actually asking you a question and then typing in your answer.

That's correct.

Yeah, yeah, not one bit was recorded.

It was all typing.

Does that strike he was odd in twenty two?

I did initially, but the more you sat there and he did it just went by it.

But he was very thorough and we got it all out and he actually apologized for things that didn't happen in the initial investigation.

Did he specify what should have happened?

No, just to getting interviewed, because he asked me, did mum and Dad get interviewed again?

I said no, they interviewed the once and that was it.

And yeah, he just trick, he said, But yeah, no, I'm glad I've done it.

So yeah.

He said it's going to be ongoing.

That you said, don't even think it's going to be swept away.

It's not.

It's going to be ongoing.

And he said, check in with me when if you want to find hour things are going.

And Peter, three hour sounds like a long time, because I mean we've spoken a number of times about it, and it doesn't take three hours for you to say what happened?

Why did it take that long.

Mainly because he was typing as well.

But when I'd say something, he wanted to know if I saw the make of the car they drove away, and stuff like that.

So everything got broken down.

When I saw the three people at the front, while were they wearing, how tall they were and.

Just be could you remember that for him?

Yes, as I said him, I can shut my eyes and see and hear what went on, so that wasn't an issue.

But the height of the two guys, because one was in the gato, one was on a thing, so it wasn't to me one was taller than the other.

And what they were wearing.

Could remember that what were they wearing?

The dark haired guy had jeans and a brownish reddish jumper on.

The fair headed guy was like in Denham and it looked like a faded Denham top.

The woman he was talking to was shielded behind him, so I couldn't really see she had pants on.

But that was about it.

But from what the other two were where he is plain as they Then I had to draw the outline of my house and the insight the layout say where I was to everything happening.

Then I had to draw the street all the houses and picture where the people were standing, and meah, do all that.

And Peter Sellers was happy to do all that pleased at The official Easy Street file now contains his account of what he heard on the night of the killings and what he saw two nights later.

But what still wasn't clear was what police meant about having spoken to missus Coventry.

For several weeks I tried to get them to explain, and then on December five, twenty twenty two, I received another email from the media office.

There was now quote approval to disclose that police obtained a statement from Gladys Coventry on February eleventh, nineteen seventy eight.

Unquote.

It hadn't gone to the coroner, they added, as it was obviously obtained after the inquest, but her statement could not be provided.

Quote we have approval for release of certain information given its an active investigation.

This is our public position unquote.

Again, it remains unclear if detectives spoke to missus Coventry at all on the day the two suess were found, or if they only took a statement from her after she spoke with Truth thirteen months later.

But given her clear description of a tall man with dark brown hair in the house next door.

Why wasn't even more made of this publicly?

Why wasn't a sketch of this guy posted in all the daily newspaper papers, not to mention truth.

Then there's a truly menacing figure who was apparently never a person of interest in this matter, John Joseph Power.

He'd been with nineteen year old Julianne Garcissela the night she disappeared, just eighteen months earlier in nineteen seventy five.

Those who knew Power recall his unsettling presence and say he was capable of extreme violence.

One former lawyer even believed he could well have killed three women in two years.

In fact, he told me that Power was quote a really bad guy, exactly the kind of guy who could do something so bad unquote.

So did detectives ever take a proper look at him in relation to Easy Street?

Or did the fact that he'd been named in the explosive Beach inquiry into allegations of police misconduct mean he was off limits to police at the time.

Fifteen years after the Easy Street killings, Hour was jailed for raping a nineteen year old woman and to be fair, his DNA would have long been in the system given the amount of time he spent in jail, so maybe he was ruled out definitively.

Others have certainly been tracked by police through the decades, but all to no avail.

There have been no arrests, no convictions.

So forty seven years after the murders on Easy Street, nearly five decades since Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett were fatally stabbed and young Gregory left alone in his cot, are there enough new facts and circumstances to compel a second coronial inquest.

Former Independent Federal MP Phil Cleary believes so, and cites the Maria James case that went to the Victorian coroner for a second time in twenty twenty one.

It shone new light on the original investigation into Maria's death, including detective's failure to formally interview Peter Keo, who later fatally stabbed Cleary's sister.

The new inquiry into Maria James's murder was ordered after an application by one of his sons that the first coroner's finding be set aside.

Karin and Caitlin English was damning in her finding, even though she couldn't identify Maria James's killer, but she did name two men as significant persons of interest, Keo and Catholic priest Anthony Bonjono.

Not Surprisingly, Phil Cleary is adamant about what should happen next in the Easy Street matter.

It's unbelievable that we haven't been able to solve this crime.

What we know from the Maria James inquest is that you can unearth a whole lot of fascinating material and events and facts that throw new light on the killing of women, which I say has not been properly investigated historically.

So we go to Easy Street people now exploring the question of DNA.

Of course, we should go back and re visit how DNA was used, and maybe we'll find material, maybe we'll discover something about the DNA that does throw new light on the killing.

But also from my perspective, I continue to say that contemporary inquests for historical acts of violence are so critical to our understanding.

For me, it's like a truth commission.

It enables us to put a considered more objective light on our failings or the failings of the past.

But if a second inquest is ordered, what should it look at Professor Stephen Cordner.

Well, look, I think probably at this point you could reasonably expect a high level of transparency about what investigators have actually found, so that that gets out a bit further that might prompt or job people's memories or consciences to actually do something.

I think it's really trying to get to people out there that might have something to say that for some reason either haven't been spoken to or haven't felt like they could share, but could now be re assured that it's okay, you know, but we need to hear it before it's all too late.

Victoria's state coroner will decide whether this happens or not.

For now, this question remains how long can justice for Sue and Suzanne be denied