Ballarat's one of those places where everyone sort of knows everyone. It is still a pretty big regional Victorian city, but there is that sort of closeness. As you spoke about some of the theories and rumors that we've heard in the past six to nine months, just ridiculous.
I was staggered. It was just unbelievable. And I mean, seriously, this decade one of the great crime stories that they've made an arrest over easy story. I'm Andrew Ruhle, and this is Life in Crimes. And today we have a studio full of colleagues from the left, Anthony Dowsley, who's recently returned to us from other parts, Olivia Jenkins and Reagan Hodge, our expert reporters are here because there has been a year full of events. There's been crimes of
all sorts, starting back in February. On February fourth, from memory, with the disappearance of sam Murphy, Samantha Murphy at Now this was a shocking thing that became more shocking by the day and then by the week as it turned out that there was no sign of this wife and mother who had gone jogging near her family farmlet just outside Ballarat and it vanished into thin air. Clearly something very bad had happened, but we didn't know exactly what
it was. I suspect, though, Olivia, that the police started to formulate some theories reasonably early in the peace.
What do you think, Yeah, that's right. Well, they were scouring, as you said, bushland in Ballarat pretty much from when
she went missing. There were very highly publicized public search efforts with Missing Persons Squad and a range of sort of specialist teams from across different areas of Victoria Police and even federal police were brought in at some stage as well, and with dogs with dogs as well who in some cases have been trained to specially sniff out software technology in the ground and things that have been hidden and buried deliberately, so they were brought in as well,
and of course forensic experts were scouring bushland with them as well. And all of this has been done since February four And I say that because they still haven't located her remains. And despite that fact, the accused, who we now know to be a young man from the same area as well, who goes by the name of Patrick Orn Stevenson, who's a twenty two to twenty three year old who has been in custody since around early March and has since pleaded not guilty to what police say is her murder.
It's a fascinating case, and of course Steve will be a trial eventually, and we won't be speculating about who'd done what, because that would be wrong. But in general terms, I can recall driving to Bellaret in that first fortnight or so because I had a reason to go there, and I thought I'll go up early and have a look around, and drove around past their house and in out those country roads and through the bush and so on,
just to get a feel for it. I thought, while I'm here, I might as well have a good look. You know, there's dam over there, and there's bush here, and there's gravel road here and all that, and all of it very close to Ballarat itself, extremely close. So within minutes of being in bushland and farmland, you're right
in suburban Ballarat. And if you go down there on that side of Ballarat there's a pub and there's a bottle shop, and at six pm on a Saturday afternoon there's three young people off their brains walking along the middle of the street, yelling at cars, throwing cans, dropping bottles.
Of stuff, clearly off their.
Heads on more substance than one, and it made me think, oh, so you're doing that. You're doing that at about six or seven o'clock on a Saturday evening one day, messy, you're going to be by five am to my all right on Sunday, you're going to be very dangerous if you're driving around because you're clearly off your brains.
Brigan Hodge, Ballarat's one of those places where everyone sort of knows everyone. It is still a pretty big regional Victorian city, but there is that sort of closeness as you spoke about. Some of the theories and rumors that we've heard in the past six to nine months just ridiculous, two graphic and too inappropriate to even publish. Horrible, but they are just swirling around the rumor mill in Ballarat. We've been sent text messages that this might have allegedly happened,
this person has it out for this person. None of those have been substantiated in court, so it's just been a wild ride. We're talking American news stations picking this story up.
It's funny. You can get Australian crimes that sort of they pluck a chord in the international interest. Often that ourt backy thing gets them in some crimes play bigger over there than they do here in a way, because they find it endlessly exotic, you know, when you know, I didn't go take some baby or whatever it might be.
It's very interesting for young readers and perhaps young reporters to see how crazy people can speculate and how certain they can be that their theory is right because they were told by Jabata Pabu's uncle is a policeman's best mate or something, and ultimately all these things turn out
to be hot air. It does make you realize how we have to be careful because people will always fill the void with speculation, and the speculation becomes a rumor, and the rumor becomes sort of a de facto fact in the absence of real facts.
Which is why I guess we have to be really careful reporting on this, because even if you hear one of those rumors from say six people, yep, you still might be completely incorrect if you want to publish it.
So they should have.
Heard it from the same one person.
Exactly absolutely, and the echo chamber effect is very powerful, and it's over and over in you know, all these years I've been doing it, you keep thinking, you know, often you hear something happened, My god, that's great. And I don't think I've ever heard something that sounds like a great story that's ever panned out to be one. I might be wrong, but mostly they're.
Not maybe a fraction of what I've started off.
Mostly they're just they're too good to be true.
They're not true. But we'll see what happens with that one. Clearly, probably it's an awful thing, but it's probably a fairly banal explanation and place wrong time.
Police haven't been without their breakthroughs. You know, we say this noting that they haven't found her body, but throughout this entire investigation there have been updates, and of course one of the most important being that they managed to locate her phone in a damn that you were talking about earlier up in bun and Yong, and that was probably one of the most significant breaks throughs in the case for at least a few months.
Anthony Dowsley, Yeah, Andrew, that was at the beginning of the year. But a story that's playing out right now is the arrest over the murders at Easy Street that happened way back in nineteen seventy seven.
Easy Street is one of the biggest crime stories of my lifetime, without a doubt. It's up there with the Beaumont children and a few others, and mostly for two reasons. She Street is a name that it sticks in the head. If it was called Smith Street, it wouldn't have the same resonance. And the other one is that it has never been solved. And for what forty something is It looked as if it would never be solved and they would never get near it, and then out of the
blue comes on arrest in Rome late this year. An astonishing development. And I would have offered fifty thousand to one against it happening, but.
There it is.
It's just it's so fascinating.
Why are you say those odds are so long?
Because by and large, when somebody's been murdered all that time ago, you start to think, well, it's so long ago, there's no evidence left. There's probably the only candidates for it are dead. You know, if they couldn't solve it, then why are they going to be able to solve it now? And usually that's true. Usually that's right. But
they just went back through the files. As one has often said and others probably have said, the answer is often in the file, that they have actually spoken to somebody who knows more than they let on, and that the names in the file that were collected in that first fortnight often hold a clue to solving an old crime and an old unsolved. And indeed, in this case
we're not saying it solved. In this case, it did lead back to week one when a guy called Perry Krumblus we'll call him Perry, which is short for his rather exotic gris first name, was pulled up in Collingwood by a very young uniformed policeman not Neittles, who was only what twenty one or two or something at the time. He knew Perry has a bit of a local scaleywag, now a kid around eighteen years old. He said, pull over,
open the boot, give me a look. When he looks in the boot, he finds a sheath knife in a leather sheath. Knew he'sh looking knife, opened it up, had a look, and either the policeman or later other police found a little bit of blood left inside the scabbard, a leather scabbard or sheath, and Perry Karumblus's name was handed to the homicide squad of the day, as you know, he's got a knife feast from around there. And Karumblus was interviewed very robustly, as they used to do in
those times. Was a different world, I have to say, and they used to interview people with extreme vehemence, and clearly he withstood that, and they said, well, it's not him. His story is he picked the knife up near the railway track at Victoria Park, which sort of makes sense because if somebody was running away from the murder scene and they might throw it off that footbridge and drop it on the railway track, makes sense he may well
have picked it up. And indeed, they didn't look at that guy again for more than forty years.
Until about twenty seventeen, around about ye.
Around then, in fact, yeah, forty odd years.
What was it in twenty seventeen that come about whether he was interviewed again.
They finally got around to going through again. One of their problems was they always had a short list of names. They had eight names on a list and they had you know, Barry Woodard the Shearer and his brother. They Barry had gone out with one of the girls, su Zann Armstrong from Herah. The coppers always naturally thought he might have been jealous. Whatever, he was a good candidate, they thought. And several other people they had six others. One of them had gone back to England. He'd gone
to England. It's one of the eight suspects. So in two thousand and I'm going to say two thousand and eight roughly, they had this group of eight people and they said, right, let's go to DNA, and we've now got DNA. It's really good. And they did Barry Woodhard and his brother Dick, not him. They do, you know, Bill Smith somewhere else, and they do Andrew Jones somewhere else.
And they fly to England and they go down to some coastal resort place and they get some derelict who used to live in Melbourne and he's getting his doll check and they grab him and get him to Wick on the spit on the thing they checked the DNA, not him.
And there was a famous, famous racing.
Famous racing car driver involved. But I don't know that they they don't know.
That well they tried to get his DNA. In fact, I think they did from relatives, Oh yes, to eliminate him.
Peter Brock, we're talking about Peter Brock. He was one of many people.
Who had visited that house or.
Others include the and he told me this himself. It's no secret. Bernie the attorney, Bernie Barmer, the well known defense lawyer, as a young man, had visited that house because he'd come from Broadford and he'd been taught by Suzanne Butler, so he knew he knew his old teacher and whatever, and he visited the house, and the police
knew that because he left his school jumper there. He still had a school jumper which he used to wear because back in those days children we were very poor and we would wear our school jumpers after we left school. And his name was in the back of his jumper, b Barma. So the coppers at that time called him and said, what's your jumper doing here? And he told him I visited Miss Bartlett or whatever.
So this process of DNA elimination, because they had DNA from the crime saying good point is what has led to a call at Perry's house.
That short list of eight, they were eliminated, and I think that sort of flattened the police's big effort, and they went, oh, we haven't got a list. So they left it alone for another nine years.
And then we get to about twenty seventeen.
That's right, and then they said, now let's actually have a good go at this, and they gave it to some keen person who was a good worker, who compiled a long list of what one hundred and sixteen names or something more than one hundred, and of course many of them were already dead. So let's say there was ninety left on the list or something, and they started
to pick them off, go and get DNA. And when they knocked on the door of Perry Karumbla, so it was just one of the ninety and said, Perry, you know remember us, You know, our ancestors interviewed you back in nineteen seventy seven. When the police approached Perry Karumblas, apparently he wasn't that keen on giving them a DNA sample, which is he's right, and everybody's right. A lot of innocent people don't like giving DNA samples. I wouldn't be keen on it myself, because you never know what can
happen with them. They can make a mess in the laboratory and mix it up with somebody else, and next thing you're in jail for something you didn't do.
So it's fair enough.
Now.
The point is he didn't give it, and he went to Greece and he didn't come back, and that mating more interesting than he had seemed earlier.
And why can't we just go to Greece and get him?
So please?
You ask that because there is a Greek law that says you can't just come along and talk to somebody about a twenty plus year old crime and extradite them because they don't have extradition with us on those terms.
We have a marvelous relationship with.
Greece, we do.
We are the biggest Greek city outside Athens, are we not?
That's right, So that's surprising to me that we don't have any extradition treaty with that country.
Well, you're right, but we don't. So of course it was then up to the police to to really think about this and work out how they could get him to come home. And I think probably they worked out that if he went to Italy or somewhere nearby, that they could then get into pold to grab him, and that scenario unfolded.
Well, does anyone he know? Did they say you won the lottery and he had to pick up the prize money.
In Rome, there was talk of some sort of business venture or the state k did yeah, real estate business venture. There's been a few sort of yeah possibilities thrown around, and it was the initial talk of some sort of holiday as well. But the timing of that was interesting, given that he hadn't left Greece, specifically Athens, where he's got a brother that he was living with for the past few years, I think following the death of their mum, which was you know, while he told friends he left
and why he'd stayed since. So, yeah, he up and left, and the interphole notice triggered the alert to the Australian.
I think it'll probably be alleged in court that somebody lured him to Rome on the promise of some business deal.
But so what how frustrating would it have been for the police to have to wait till he left that country, till they could pounce on him, like he was there for years and years. They forget about it some days, But how frustrating for investigators that they feel like they're so close to making an arrest but they can't because of international law exactly.
So it was very good that a way was devised to get him to go to visit Rome, and I think they grabbed him at the airport as soon as he flew in, So there was a team clearly waiting for him.
The cunning plan, the cunning plan.
Possibly then, of course he went to the world's worst prison in I think inside it might be ordinary, a bit overcrowded, and he wouldn't have any.
Legal aid there.
So after a while he thought, I might as well fight this back home where I can get legal aid, be in a nicer jail, I presume.
So are you saying that that might be the biggest trial of the year if it happens in twenty twenty.
Five, it's one of the big ones for me, and if it gets to trial. But they're all good. They're like children, these trials. You can't have a favorite.
They're all good.
That's how I feel about them, you know.
And one's a little one's a little fat guy, and one's tall, thin, but they're all good.
You're describing yourself and myself.
Yeah, I'm really tall.
Can I just ask some of the two women. This is something that's languished over your career. It's coming into the stages of Reagan and Ie because now it's language is so long. It's language over Ron Riddle's career. But who were Susan Armstrong and Susan But they lived in the house together, but be there.
Well, the two Sues. There's Big Sue and little Suit. They came from the Northeast. They'd known each other at I think Baronella High School. There were good friends there. Big Sue was a very beautiful woman. Susan Armstrong was a small, all vivacious, sort of tough tom boyish girl known to my family. Incidentally, just shows that we live in a village because so often when crimes happen, tragedies happen,
it affects someone you know. And in fact, my grandmother, my dear old grandmother who's no longer with us, made the wedding cake or ice, the wedding cake of the Armstrongs, the parents of so when I met them. They visited us once when I was a kid, not her though, it was her little sister for sure, and I remember meeting them and someone. So they were country people. They were in those days. I think farmers, the Armstrongs. They go to school together, they come to Melbourne together. Little
Sue is a traveler, adventurous, bit ballsy. She goes to London, she goes to the Greek Islands. She comes back. She goes to London, goes to Greek islands the second time. I think. She falls in love with a Greek fisherman on an island of Naxos. She wants to get married, or they want to get married or whatever, but it's tricky with certain rules and regulations over there in that era. And she has a little boy that she called Gregory, which is not a terribly Greek name, but there you go.
And she comes home to Melbourne after telling her Greek fishermen that they'll sort it out and they'll all get married later on and live happily ever after.
What she actually did was.
Go to Collingwood and rent her house with Susan Bartlett and live happily ever after there in fact, for a few weeks, not ever after, And she used to be seen riding a bike around Collingwood with a little carrier basket on the back.
She's one of the early adopters of what is.
So common now. She was very unusual then and you know, cooking up a storm and they had a pet dog and lived a very Bahomian life. They had a lot of friends and a lot of people used to come around for drink and a barbecue and all that sort of stuff. And that made it difficult for the police when they were murdered, because the police it wasn't that they didn't have one or two suspects. They had too many. They had you know, there's.
A racing card driver, there's a journalist. There's the journalist.
Yes, he was next door on the night of the murders. He was staying with two young women who worked in newspapers, one of whom I knew because I worked with her at the age. She was the one that found the bodies.
There was obviously a boyfriend.
Well, there were boyfriends. There were other friends, There were friends of boyfriends. There were so many people who are very popular in them. They were popular, well known, they were gregarious, etc. And they had a lot of visitors, and that made it very hard for the police to sort of work out who was who in the.
Zoo and incredibly. One visitor came in through a back entrance.
He did while I think we both of the.
Victims were I think we had two weeks out in front of the house.
I think the sheer and his brother turned up lucky. There was two of them, possibly in a way, and one wanted to go down and look at the into the house, and the other buck said no, no, it's a bit rude. You can't walk in. They got into the kitchen, okay, through the back gate.
And it's one of these terrors all the way at the front, and then there's a bit of a kitchen at the back.
Very long and thin, so you you know, you're twenty five meters from the front door. And the other brother said, no, it's a bit rude, don't go up there. And so they didn't see anything and didn't hear the little boy crying. He might have the house.
How eerie?
Is that eerie? Totally gregory, but eighteen months or whatever he was. And another fellow climbed through one of the bedroom windows, that's right, and he wrote down and there was a telephone with the home phone number, and he wrote down the phone number on his pack of the cigarettes and climbed back out the window, Susan Bartlett's window. And Susan Butler wasn't killed there. She was in the hallway, so he didn't see anything. And of course he would have been in a lot of trouble. But he had
a mate who driven him there. And the mate said, no, I drove him there. It was ten o'clock and I was in and he was okay. But these two guys that could have been in a world of trouble. And also John Grant, the journo who stayed next door the previous night, I remember him. He was a very knock about fellow for a journo. He ran around with a lot of crooks. He was well known to crooks, pretty well respected by crooks in a way that we don't
see these days. Because he worked for The Truth newspaper, which was a sort of a scandal rag, but a very good newspaper in its way.
I used to break a lot of stories.
And John Grant was good at breaking stories, and he had good contacts among the crooks and among the police, and did a lot of drinking and all the rest of it. He had one problem, and his problem was he'd been one of the last to see alive a girl called Julie Garcia Solay about eighteen months earlier in North Melbourne, and she clearly was abducted and murdered. There's
no doubt that's true. That's what happened. And three men have been in her flat that night, and one of them was John Grant and the.
Other two the other two were scllywags.
But one of them was a very bad man called John Joseph Power, who undoubtedly Guilder.
I remember John Joseph Power.
Yes, no good you'd remember him, I.
Do, yes, I remember hearing about him when I was a kid.
Oh yeah, yeah.
He was bad news. So John Grant had a big problem. He didn't have form, but he'd been here. He was next door to a double murder, and eighteen months before he'd been one of three men at a flat where Julie Garcia Slay Californian Earl had disappeared from. And John Grant was probably fairly frank with the police when he was interviewed about that. But I note with easy Street, I think he went through a very robust interrogation.
I was told it felt incredibly unlucky.
He was very unlucky and he would have felt more unlucky after twenty four hours at Russell Street because they gave him the realms of the kitchen. I know that because the head of the homicide's god told me later, and no doubt so he had a real rough time. Totally innocent. There's nothing to connecting with it whatsoever.
It always was, always was, Andrew.
Can I fast forward to September twenty twenty four. It was a Saturday morning, the usual Saturday morning in the office here. You were at home or was your day off? Can you talk us through the first few moments when you learned that there had been an arrest and a big development in this case. Obviously you've covered it so many times in previous years, Stagger.
It was just unbelievable. And I mean, seriously, this decade, one of the great crime stories that they've made. An arrest over easy straight it's you know, it's right up there, and you know Beaumont's is the other one, and there's not many others that you could think of. And mister Crule, I guess yet, if they suddenly arrested someone for mister Crule, it would be it'd be that big.
Did you think they would ever arrest anyone.
No, they had no reason to think that. But looking at it now, I go, well, a lot of lazy policing in those days and they didn't have all the tools that we've got there yea, and Dana's the big one.
Now.
The Italian police have been coordinating their efforts with Australian authorities over this. They obviously had a specialized team ready to go when Into Pol picked him up flying into Rome. He was obviously arrested at Fumigino Airport.
Yes, Canbalus sat in an Italian prison for a while. There was a fairly straightforward extradition process and three members of vict police, including the head of the homicide squad, Dean Thomas, went over and collected him. He was interviewed by police and charged with murder and rape. And now Olivia, he's on remark so remind.
Where he'll maybe be in some slightly better conditions than in Rome, where it's very overcrowded and subpar subpar jail cell as we understand. But he would have undergone a health check I think as well, and he's understood to be in pretty good health and is understood to be quite worried about what he's up against.
But he agreed to return. That's he did.
He didn't fight it, and I think, as you said, Andrew, he probably thought he'd have a better shot at fighting this thing if he's got better legal representation with his interest at heart in his hometown or his home city. He was appointed a public defender in Rome who has obviously, you know, fulfilled her duty and done a good job and made sure he's okay physically and mentally in everything, and facilitated a visit with at least one of his
brothers over his sort of temporary detention in Rome. But now that job will be handed over to a legal counsel of his own, choosing which he can do.
Krumblus has already chosen his representation, Bill doug who's a high profile solicitor in Melbourne. He gets a lot of the big cases, so he's already got a lawyer. And now he could even go for bail possibly, but he would have to go to the Supreme Court to get that. It's quite rare in murder cases, but it's not out of the realms of possibility.
So what do you think, Andrew, that'd be interesting.
Someone somewhere will have to pull a large tin of money out of the backyard.
Someone will argue that he's like life risk, but I think I think that's given that the crime is so long ago, he might just go for bail.
And he's conceivably get it.
He does have support from his brothers andres in Greece, and he's got another brother in Bulleen, which is obviously in the Eastern suburbs, which isn't too far from where he lived for quite a long time, not too far from his old business in Dandeong. So he does have people here that may back him if he does apply for that.
Well, that's one of the interesting aspects of this case. Given he's been charged, it'll be up to the court to determine whether he gets bail and indeed whether he's guilty or not guilty. And so I suppose it's a case of watch this space and it's going to be really interesting to see where this case goes in twenty twenty five.
Well, it's been quite enlightening talking to you. I think we should come back and do this again.
See you next week.
Thank you, Let's do it.
Thanks Andrew, thanks for listening.
Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun Production for True Crime Australia. Our producer is Johnty Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew Rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news podcasts sold at news dot com dot au. That is all one word news podcast's soul And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.