It's disconcerting to realize that it was only nine years after the two Suites were murdered that the first DNA evidence was presented at a criminal trial.

Somehow, it seems tantalizingly close to the case, even though it was still almost a decade before the astonishing world first breakthrough that followed an accidental scientific discovery in a nutshell.

In nineteen eighty four, UK geneticist Alex Jeffries uncovered something remarkable as he studied inherited illnesses.

He had extracted DNA from cells and attached it to photographic film.

Once developed, that film showed a row of bars, and the scientists realized that every person whose cells had been used in his study could be identified by those bars.

The process could also determine kinship, so life as we knew it, as far as identity was concerned, was forever changed.

Within two years, Jeffrey's DNA fingerprinting helped exonerator man arrested for murder in Leicestershire and convict the actual killer.

That same year, the first DNA evidence was used in a rate case in the US.

It took another three years before it was used in Australia.

In a sexual assault case in Melbourne.

What's almost as extraordinary is how there came to be any DNA to test in that INITIALSI case.

It was due to the extraordinary foresight of the late Tony Raymond, then the director of the Forensic Services Center with Victoria Police.

In nineteen eighty two, he ordered hundreds of samples from unsolved crime scenes to be stored in a special freezer at minus seventy degree celsius.

Samples including hair, clothing and seamen collected by Victorian police.

Such was Raymond's faith in the advances forensic science would make that when the technology to test samples became available in Australia a few years later, authorities had much to work with, but it took a while.

Chief Commissioner Graham Ashton only became aware of the special freezer when he was appointed the lab's director in two thousand and nine.

At that stage there were nearly two thousand samples from about six hundred unsolved crimes.

Was any evidence collected at Easy Street part of this cachet.

More importantly, was a seaman found near Suzanne's body secured in this freezer, or perhaps a similar one at a different temperature.

Then there's the crucial question that really should be addressed first, How was that sample, especially as well as blood collected at the scene, stored before Tony Raymond made his visionary decision to free certain pieces of evidence, And how secure has the evidence taken from the house in collingwould been in the past forty six years.

Victoria Police refused to shed any light on any of this.

All we know for sure is that Senior Detective Ron Iddols felt there was enough DNA material to work with to reopen the easy Stree case when he took over cold cases in twenty eleven.

After evaluating which of the states two hundred and eighty unsolved homicides were worth his new team's attention, he gave them each a color code according to their chances of being solved.

Red indicated cases that were probably never going to be solved, yellow for those that needed a total overhaul, and green for the ones they could probably solve.

The Easy Street file was one of just thirty on this list, given the green tick due to the fact that there was DNA to work with, Yet even the detective with the ninety five percent conviction rate couldn't find this killer.

Again, there were no DNA matches between any of the men tested and the evidence taken from the house.

But should this necessarily raise concerns about the way materials were held in those pre DNA years.

Some scuttle butt suggests they weren't as secure as they would be now.

Years ago, former detective Peter Hiscock was told off the record naturally that the Easy Street exhibit box went missing for nearly two decades now.

There was a situation for about seventeen years.

I think that those exhibits were misplaced down at Collingwood where they be stored.

So what's happened to those exhibits in the time.

I've got them?

Who knows?

They just been sitting in a box another area.

They've got a facility down at Collingwood.

So when did they go missing?

That's I said.

I don't know when they went missing.

But this detectives spoke to me, oh quite a few years ago and said that they've just refound them.

He actually worked out what had happened, whether they put them these with the aids.

I'm not sure.

It's a very high level system down there.

Knowing the police department.

That's a forty year old case and the exhibits have been missing for seventeen years.

That's scary in terms of solving it.

Well, you need to check that for sure, tell me, but.

Of course it is.

Again.

Victoria Police won't confirm or deny this happened, and it might not matter as long as the DNA samples were securely stored.

Dad Na Hartman manages the molecular biology lab at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine and she knows a great deal about the science the rest of us like to think we understand.

To me, DNA is it's a living thing.

It's a biological so we have to remember that it's a finite that it has properties that make it prone to degradation decomposition.

So it's something that while holds the bootprint and tells us who we are, it's not something that lives on forever, and it's something that while we can recover, it is quite precious and we have to treat it with the utmost respect.

For most part, our task is to help identify coronial cases.

So where people have been reported to the coroner and they are not able to be identified by family members, then we might apply scientific means of identification such as DNA fingerprints dental records.

For me in particular, I'm interested in being able to use DNA capabilities to help identify people.

And so in a sense, it has our imprint, if you like, and everyone's imprint is individual, very unique.

Yes, while we share a lot of things in common, there will be parts of OURNA that are unique to us.

And from the purposes of identification, what we're targeting are those parts of the DNA that are unique to us so that we can build what is known as our DNA profile.

So when we say we obtain your DNA or do a DNA profile really is we're looking at a subset of very small number of markers within your DNA that are unique and that we can then compare to the DNA profile of others.

So we're not looking at all of your DNA.

We're only targeting very specific regions that help us with identification.

And when we say markers, what do you mean by that?

But do you look sort of fragments of DNA that reside in different parts of your DNA.

So DNA is arranged into chromosomes, we would target different DNA markers at various regions in those chromosomes.

But those markers, as I said, useful for identification.

There are other DNA markers that might be useful for let's say, genetic predisposition to disease, or important for you know, biological processes in our body.

But we're targeting those that are useful for identification.

Despite her obvious expertise, Dad and A Hartman can't comment specifically about the investigation into the murders on Easy Street, but I asked her if the sample of seamen found on Suzanne's bedroom floor could survive for three nights and two days in the summer of nineteen seventy seven, Yes, we.

Should, I guess if collected appropriately and stored appropriately, we would hope to be able to go back to those sample types and extract DNA.

Now, you may not be able to extract a lot, or it may be highly degraded.

Here are the conditions the time that's passed, but we don't need a lot for what they're sort of analysis that we complete.

Therefore, if you can just recover, as you know what I said, a smidgen of DNA, that might be sufficient to be able to develop a dnair profile for comparison.

But that's dependent again on the sample being collected in an appropriate manner and stored appropriately as well.

Now, I guess, going back that period of time when perhaps we went thinking about DNA, those people that were collecting those samples that probably were not wearing their appropriate pipe that we would do now, you know, wearing gloves, masks, ensuring that we ourselves don't contaminate those samples.

How having said that, there are instances where we've been able to go back to cases, you know, cold cases where samples have been collected in a manner that was appropriate at the time, and we still successfully recover DNA profiles.

From our point of view, it's kind of you just have to give it a go.

You know, you can't say, well, you might be too old, or it might be degraded.

You just have to give it a go.

I think it's some stage someone has suggested they were put in paper bags.

Is that is that okay?

Yes, that's fine.

And again provided that they're sealed appropriately and have been, there's a chain of custody to be able to then go back and say, yes, these are the appropriate samples that belong to that case, then the ship be fine.

Now, dad Na Hartman hasn't worked on the Easy Street case.

That's all been done at the police forensics lab.

But she knows what's next in a case if there's no hits on our national criminal database and familial searchers have hit a wall.

And here's where past science really gets overtaken by contemporary scholarship.

Forensic investigative genetic genealogy FIGG.

Again, once you've looked at all your current avenues of inquiries, it might be that you might submit your sample for this application that would require you to generate a profile that's suitable for comparison to commercial databases where people have themselves have an interest in their genealogy and have provided can sent to have law enforcement be able to compare against their data.

And what you're doing is you're not actually getting their DNA from the database.

You're uploading the unknown, and you're asking whether you've got any people in the database that are closely related.

And what you get back is a list of people who share potentially some DNA with your unknown.

And then you've got to build genealogy trees and see whether you can narrow down and potentially identify your unknown.

Now that takes a lot of work.

And there's no guarantees that you will find people that are closely related to your unknown on those databases, but I guess it would be potentially another step that you could take in the investigation if your current modes of analysis don't pan out.

This has been slow to take off in Australia do to privacy issues involving the use of commercially available databases like ancestry dot com.

Yet, while legal legals take all that, Dardner warns against using up too much of the original DNA samples in historic cases.

I think it's important to particularly for these finite samples where you can't keep testing them indefinitely.

Well, eventually you're going to run out.

You know, you might have an extract of DNA and you're using a little bit at a time for the different tests.

Eventually that extract you're going to use it all up.

So it's important to safeguard that material, and I guess make those decisions as to what would be the best tool to apply.

And if that's not today, then let's wait six or twelve months and again review and see whether there's now an opportunity to use a different methodology, whether that be FIGG or something else, and they make the decision.

Again, if we accept that one hundred people have been tested against this sample that was found in Easy Street in the bedroom, that doesn't necessarily mean that one hundred little extracts came out.

No, So what would have happened is a DNA profile would have been developed from that sample.

Now that DNA profile itself can be compared to the DNA profiles of four hundred persons of interest, so it's the data that you're comparing, not the extract.

So I would hope that there would have used a small portion of that DNA extract to develop that DNA profile, that there's some DNA extract remaining and that's been stored appropriately, and that's what could be tapped in the future to develop more DNA information.

While we await this debate, a former federal MP Reckons is an even broader political cultural concern, the dog's cold cases involving women.

He's come to understand this from distressing personal experience.

Bill Clear's sister, Vicki, was fatally stabbed in nineteen eighty seven.

Her killer was found not guilty of murder after running the notorious provocation defense, and sentenced to just three years and eleven months in jail to Cleary.

The way detectives investigated both cases reeks of the same old fashioned framework.

Here two young women, one who has a child and of course is declared to be as a pejorative an unmarried mother because she's had the Greek daliance.

Of course, that's Suzanne Armstrong.

And there you have Sue Bartlett, who's the teacher.

And isn't it interesting to talk about Sue.

She was a big woman, but thankfully she had a beautiful face.

But all the while the discussion about them was about their social activities, their relationship with men.

And so from the moment they were murdered, we know that the police adopted the attitude that they had practices that put them at risk in that they came to know men.

Now the police kind of knew that.

But at the same time there was a counter story, which was that this bloke that killed them was a monster.

Now this is a perspective Phil Cleary has thought about a lot.

His sister's killer, Peter Ko was declared a person of interest in Melbourne so called bookshop murder, where Maria James was fatally stabbed in nineteen eighty.

And of course, if I put my lens on that story based on what I know about the killing of women, I don't look to that monster who they don't know.

The man who kills them is a monster, but he's an ordinary bloke as well.

But you know, we can say that these men are monsters, but they're on a continuum in that they're a monster at the point that they kill.

They have monstrous ideas in that they are riddled with misogyny andtriarchal assumptions about women, and so in essence, this is the major problem.

If we had a police force at the time that was thinking really smart about this, they would have solved the crime.

I don't believe, based on all of the empirical evidence around historical killing of women, that this bloke has wandered in off the street and knocked on the door and then killed Suzanne Armstrong.

I believe he knew her.

He may have tried it on with her before and been knocked back.

But she has been killed because she did what so many women have done historically before they've been murdered.

She said no to a Dalian's a relationship or she ended a relationship with him.

Certainly the late Brian Murphy believed the double homicide was planned to some extent in advance.

The former detective didn't beat around the bush.

No.

I think fellows that commit those kind of murders have got it on their mind all the time.

Most of those things are pre planned.

You's either seen that both of them going in if they had a k might have put petrol in one time or another and thought, I wonder where they live.

You know, there's a million reasons why they do it, But I think that they're well planned when they do it like that.

And like the lady that was killed in the booksher, I think that was planned and it's just not on off the cuff.

Theee, how is it that Maria James was murdered in nineteen eighty and Peter cho who kills my sister seven years later is not properly interviewed at the time and afterwards.

Do you see a connection between that and easy Street?

Of course you do.

So.

The upshot is surely that the institutional preconceptions about the place of women in the world, the blaming of women, afflicts every investigation unwittingly.

Prominent Melbourne lawyer Liz Dowling remembers this cultural political prism and jury calls the impact that Sue and Suzanne's deaths had in the city.

Everybody was talking about it, you know, everybody knew about easy strait, that write our bikes down there, had a look call, all of that sort of stuff.

But I guess sense that it was always in such a way as even though the media were talking about it being a madman that was walking around doing it, there was also this other aspect of it being somebody that they, the women knew, And also there was all that such shaming that they had brought it on themselves, that the doors were open.

And I mean even though they were supposed to have been a sexual revolution, I mean there was still there was still very much the ethos of You've got to remember also, Helen, that that period of time, of course, was between the contraceptive pill and aides, and it was huge up evils that had happened.

I mean, women didn't have to worry about contraceptive and men didn't have to worry about the women worrying about contraception either, and it was a bit of a free for all, certainly as far as casual sex was concerned.

The women that engaged in casual sex by certain groups.

And I'd also say quite generally still had the old tags given to them about it.

And I think that the women in easy Strait, certainly it was that view.

She was a single mother, she wasn't married.

And also the stories about you know, there were three blokes that had come in and out of the house when the bodies were on the floor and the child was even in the bedroom, giving an indication of the traffic that did go through those houses.

But that happened in all the group houses.

And do you think this in form this view of women informed not just the detectives themselves, but also their way they went about the investigation.

I think the police generally at that time came from well, they hadn't they hadn't gone to university, They left school at form five.

The people that would being the police, I mean, they weren't living in the shit holes in group houses.

So there were two completely different classes of people.

They had probably been married at twenty two or twenty three and had a couple of children.

I mean, I know I'm generalizing here, and they would have had their parents' values that women that had casual sex were sluts.

Those perceptions aside this, Dowling says the suggestion that the killer was known to either Suzanne or Susan obviously helps explain how he entered the house and maybe how he's evaded investigators for almost half a century.

I think there was the perception that they knew who the killer was, that the girls knew who the killer was.

This wasn't somebody that had someone had broken into a house in South Yarra, some married woman you know, whose husband had been overseas had been raped and killed with her friend in the house.

I think that there was a very an attitude of its time that this person was known to them.

I'm just a little curious about the person with the knife, and maybe the person with the knife meant that they were no one, maybe no one to her, but not in the circle of people that she would have considered having sex with.

Or so did someone decide that they were going to come a kniver or did the killing happen after there was a rejection of her?

But why would you come in with a knife in the first.

Place, unless to do harm?

Unless to do harm?

But like journalist Andrew Ruhle and others who've been trying to crack this conundrum for so long.

Liz also worries that all the time spent trying to get a DNA match might have just been following a DNA bunny down a rabbit hole.

And I was also interested in your book about the DNA as far as the DNA was concerned and where the DNA was found, because I think the conundrum has been if somebody did this, unless they dropped dead, it's unlikely statistically they would have led a blameless last since that period of time.

So if you take the DNA out of the equation and say, well, we don't have anything about linking the DNA to the person and testing the person with the DNA, so I'm being an amateur detective, then maybe that does broaden the group of people that could have done it within their group.

For this lawyer, the next step in this call case, nearly fifty years down the track, is a second coronial inquiry.

The savagery of it, the savagery of it is not sex gone bad, and the savagery of it looks like it's something that's been planned.

There's two women that have been extensively stabbed, and it didn't seem to be clear at the time, about how deep the wounds were, how they actually died, whether they were already dead when and that, like a lot of the stabbing went on, that just all didn't seem to be quite clear.

So our crinal inquests could possibly explore those issues.

Next time on the Easy Street murders.

We should go back and revisit how DNA was used.

This was a huge event for Melbourne for Collingwood.

Contemporary inquests are so critical to our understanding on the failings of the past.

What have you got to those