The Easey Street suspect - Perry Kouroumblis

This is Life and Crimes. As we sit here recording this podcast, it is just five days since one of Australia's biggest ever crime stories took a dramatic new twist. That, of course, is the Easy Street cold case. Easy Street is well known to probably all our listeners, particularly if they are over a certain age. Happened in nineteen seventy seven. Two young women living in a rented house in Collingwood in Easy Street, Collingwood were stabbed to death one night

in January nineteen seventy seven. In fact, it was the night of January the tenth, which I think was a Monday. It was hot weather. It was a very hot summer. The two sus as they were known, they were old friends from the Banella, Euroa area they'd grown up in the country. One was Suzanne Armstrong, Little Sue as people called hers. She was the smaller and darker of the pear,

and the other one was Big Sue. That was Susan Bartlett, who actually was a teacher, a secondary school teacher, formerly at Broadford High School north of Melbourne, but at this time, at the time of her murder, she was a teacher at Collingwood High They hadn't been in the house very long. They'd only been in there a matter of weeks. Suzanne Armstrong had been away for a couple of years. These girls were in their late twenties I think twenty seven

one twenty eight, similar age. Susan Armstrong had spent a fair bit of time overseas, I think up to something like two years, and in that trip she had stayed in Greece, and she had stayed for quite a while, many months on the Greek island of Naxos, and there she had formed a relationship with a handsome young fisherman and she planned to marry that guy, and they bought

rings and did all that sort of stuff. And one of the reasons that they planned to marry was that Susan Armstrong had become pregnant with her little boy, Gregory, and Gregory was born in Greece, in I think at Naxos, but certainly in Greece. But there were great difficulties for Susan Armstrong arranging to marry a Greek national priests were a problem, and the authorities were a problem with citizenship

papers and all sorts of things. And in the end Suzanne thought it was all too hard, and she said to her fiance or the father of her baby boy, I'm going to go home for a while and we'll meet up later and we might be able to get married later on. I'm not sure if she meant in Australia or in Greece, but the reality was she came home to Melbourne and moved into her house in Collingwood with her little boy and with her old friend, her old school friend, Susan Bartlett. And so that is the

background to this story. It's an interesting bit of background Suzanne Armstrong's trip to Greece and her relationship with a Greek fellow, because, as it turns out, forty seven years later, there is a Greek connection. Probably by chance, you would think, I don't think there's anything sinister about that. The big news as we record this podcast is of course that a week ago authorities in Rome in Italy arrested on behalf of the Australian police a Greek national called Perry

Korumblis now Perry Korumbliss is a dual citizen. He lived in Australia in Melbourne as a young man, as a child and a young man before moving back to Greece where he apparently he and his brother one of his brothers looked after or lived with their aged parents. And this is an interesting set of events and a set of events that will be discussed and pulled apart, probably in a court of law, about the reasons for Perry

going back to Greece. It's tempting to say that no one had ever heard of Perry Karumblis until this week, but the reality is that he had been heard of because back in nineteen seventy seven, after these two young women were murdered after their bodies were found butchered in their house in Collingwood, after Suzanne Armstrong was found with something like twenty six I think stab wounds and her friend Susan Bartlett was found with more than fifty stab wounds.

It was obviously a frenzied killing, and the killer had obviously gone crazy with a large bladed knife. Looking back over all these years, we think, oh, well, the police never really came up with anybody or anything to do with this murder. Well, in a sense, that's true. But of course at the time of the murder and in the days and weeks after the murders, the police were looking very hard for anybody who might throw some light on it, and there were a lot of names thrown around.

There would have been people giving anonymous hips and dobbing in the guy down the road or the guy that looked funny at the train station or whatever. As often happens with high profile murders, it's not so much a case of police not getting enough information from the public or enough tip offs. They get too many. They get swamped with stuff, most of which is obviously white noise. It's just assumptions and speculations and rumors and gossip and

all the rest of it. And now, in that period, and this is only a matter of about a week after those murders, a young guy from Collingwood known by the local police as a naughty boy. He had a bit of form and was one of the young fellas

that Collingwood police kept an eye on. This young bloke was pulled up in a car by a young uniform policeman and that young uniform policeman was called Ron Iddle's and of course ron Itodles would later become well known in Melbourne and in Victoria as a homicide squad detective. But at this stage he's a very young copper in uniform. But he was always pretty keen and on the ball. And he saw this young Greeg bloke, Perry Krumblis, driving around and he pulled him up, as you know coppers do.

And he pulled this guy up and said where you're going, Perry, and what are you up to? And can you give me the case to the boot? And he happens a boot and he checks the boot, which is what good police work is all about. Right down. You know who you pulled over, what they're driving, all the details and searched the car. See what's in there? Is there a body in the boot, Is there a weapon? Is there stolen goods? It's routine stuff in the boot. There is

a large bladed knife in a leather scabbard. It seemed that there might have been a trace of blood still on it somewhere. But anyway, the young Ron Eddles, who is of course a copper in uniform and very junior, all he can really do with it is hand the young fellow's name, Perry Karumbliss real name, real first name, will be rather more involved than Perry. It might be Pericles possibly, or Periclart's. But he can hand the name and date of birth and address to the homicide squad

along with the knife, which is what he did. And so this fellow, Perry Karumblis, his name goes on a list along with a lot of other names, essentially for the homicide squad to look at. Now I understand, I think this to be true, but I can't prove it.

But I understand that Perry Karumblis was picked up in the subsequent days by the homicide squad and he was questioned very intensely and intensively and robustly, as happened back in those days, and he was asked about his movements on the night of the murder and what he was up to. And you know, how come he's going around with a knife and the boot and so on and

so forth. His story then, and his story to Ron Iddall's, his story to the homicide squad, and no doubt his story today and tomorrow and next week and next month and next year when he appears in court in Melbourne, is that he found the knife. It wasn't his knife

that he picked it up. Oh, someone near the railway tracks, something to do with the footpath that leads over the Punt Road in those days from one side of Collingwood over to the Victoria Park side, and that it looked as if somebody had tossed it out and left it there, and he found it and put it in the boot of his car because he wasn't one to waste a good knife sort of thing. Now, that was his story and apparently he was sticking to it. That's fine. But

when the inquest comes around. In those days, in quests came up a bit sooner than they do now. So these young women were killed in January. Their inquest is in July of the same year, so it's only six months later. And when that inquest comes up in front of mister Pasco sm the name of Perry Karumblis, he's raised. He's raised as one of presumably several people who would be of some interest to check out whether they had

questions to answer. Now, from looking at the files and looking at the contemporary stories, it would appear that Perry Karumblus did not appear at the coroner's inquest, and it would appear that the police version of this is though he's gone into smoke, he's disappeared so effectively the authorities at that time did not consider him sufficiently of interest as a potential murder suspect to pursue him then, and to some extent, Perry Crumblas was written out of this

case back in nineteen seventy seven for reasons that I don't fully understand, except probably this that in the end they didn't have anything to go on except he had

been pulled up with a knife in the boot. Well, he wouldn't be the only fellow in Collingwood with a knife, honor about his person, And in those days before DNA, this is you know, we're talking two decades before DNA became a real thing, they had no real way of connecting that knife with any particular offense, and so his name just lapsed into the void, along with others Also, I have to say, I think the police became pretty keen on the idea, and this is only natural, pretty

keen on the idea that most murders are close the home, that most murders are committed by somebody well known to the victims, and eight out of ten times that is true.

And the police had a small gas board of potential persons of interest to look at her were a bit closer to home than Perry Kurumblas, such as Susanne Armstrong's new boyfriend who was a shearer called Barry Woodard from Euroa Way, and Barry's brother Henry, and a string of other people who had known either or both of those young women, you know, former boyfriend's, former friends, visitors that had dropped in there and so on. And the police

had several names. Indeed, they ended up with a shortlist of eight names, which they were pretty keen on. And I think the police formed the view early on that the killer is one of our shortlist of eight and

they didn't really look further than that. And what happened here was that when DNA, which was science fiction back in the seventies, when DNA became a usable investigative tool, in the nineties, they said hooray for DNA and they got their short list of eight suspects, and they rattled around Victoria and Australia and even sent detectives to England to interview one fellow to get DNA samples to match

up against the sample that they had. And the sample they had was taken from on or near Susan Armstrong's body. Susann Armstrong, not to put too fine a point on it, had been raped, probably after her death, and so there was a seaman sample that the police could they did save and was able to be used for DNA purposes more than twenty years later. And so armed with this, the police had detectives going around testing their short list of eight people. Long story short, they didn't get a hit.

None of these matched up, and so there they were in nineteen ninety eight, what twenty one years after the murders, without a feather to fly with, they tested their no result. Now, in a perfect world, which it's not. In a perfect world, you'd think they'd expand the list and look further. They'd go wider ripples, ever, widening circle of suspects, and you would think they would have looked through whatever records they had,

which I think were sketchy, but they did exist. From the file there at all file which was a pretty small file on the murder, but also contemporary logbooks and running sheets of the local police around Collingwood, Fitzroy, Carlton, the inner suburbs, to see who else was around and about, and you know, who was related, who was a friend, who was a friend of a friend, all that stuff, the neighbors, the people that lived in the street, who was you know, the guy working on the roof two

doors down, who was the brick layer laying bricks one hundred meters away? All those things that did not happen. That did not happen in the nineties, It did not happen in the next ten years. It wasn't until around something like two thousand and sixteen or thereabouts that the homicide squad or the crime department had one of its periodic bursts of housekeeping and decided that they should review

some of their outstanding cold cases. And the Easy Street case was handed to a detective to review, and that detective carefully went through the files and through all those things I said, presumably the running sheets and all the rest of it and was able to compile a long list. Now, this long list I think was something like forty one dead people and about ninety live ones, so the total

list was one hundred and thirty one. And even with dead people, they could get DNA samples from relatives, close relatives of the dead person of interest. So if Joe Blogs is a person of interest, he's dead, we get his brother or his son or somebody like that and test that person. If they're still alive, you test the suspect you love, the one you're with. And that is what they did. And so in around twenty sixteen and seventeen police went around and they slowly ticked off the

list ninety live, forty one dead. Test here, test here, test here, asking people to you know, little saliva test or whatever it was. Well, that's fine, of course. The good thing about asking people for a DNA sample is that anybody that refuses you becomes instantly more interesting. Their reaction becomes interesting. If they've got absolutely nothing to hide,

their relax, They don't care. They just do it, except for some cranks who just are against it non principle, of course, But most people, if they're innocent, they just hand it over and that's that. But if you run against someone who gets nervy and twitchy and defensive and doesn't want to do it straight away, they become the targets of more intensive investigation. And one of the people on the list was I'll mate Perry Karumblis. This is in twenty and seventeen in Melbourne and Perry Karumblis at

this stage is about fifty nine years old. He's a wiry, reasonably fit looking, half tough looking bloke who works in the wrought iron business. I think he had his own business out at dandy On. I think he'd probably been living around Bulleen. It's for a large part of the intervening decades, and I think after he's misspent youth, he'd stayed out of trouble apparently for the intervening years and

was a relatively hard working bloke. I think he might have had a bit of an interesting motorbikes and that sort of stuff. Certainly he had a couple of brothers that other people got to know. One was called Andy, his real name, of course in the Greek was Andreas, and he had another brother who's called Tony, who still lives in Melbourne. I think he might have an antique store or something like that. So these brothers were living along in Melbourne. Their parents had returned to Greece. Now

this is intriguing and interesting. It's not necessarily damning, but it is intriguing. To be fair, A lot of people who migrated from Greece to Australia and to Canada after spending x twenty years, twenty five years, whatever working in their new country, saved up money and qualified for pensions in some cases and superannuation, whatever it might be, and

they moved back to their home country, to Greece. Because back there often they would have inherited a cheap property in a village somewhere where they could go back to. It would cost them nothing or next to it, and the money that they could take back with them from Australia or Canada set them up pretty well in Greece. And I know this is true because I know traveling in Greece in the eighties and more recently, it was common to find people, even in out of the way places,

who said, oh, you're Australian, how's Collingwood going? And you know, I used to have a holden when I worked in Melbourne and all this stuff. It was a big thing. Every village had repatriated locals who had worked for many years in Australia and in Canada. And so the fact that Perry Crumblus's parents had gone back to Greece was not in itself that significant or that suspicious. But the timing of it is interesting because in July of nineteen seventy seven, the inquest, as we said, was held into

the deaths of the two sous Armstrong and Bartlap. That same month, the Karumblis family that has seen them, mister and missus, they sell their house in Bendigo Street in Collingwood. They move out of Collingwood and they disappear from the electoral role and apparently they go back to Greece. Now whether they went back to Greece, you know, in that July or was that year or whatever, but they got

rid of their house in Collingwood and they left. Now, this is the same month when their son is named, their son, Perry is named in newspaper reports and other things as a person of interest or a witness or whatever in this terrible murder case. And looking back on it with the wisdom of hindsight, it does appear that they might have wanted to not be around for too much longer. It might have just prompted them to act on an impulse to go home anyway, And so they did.

And it's true that their son Andreas Andy went back over there with them, and we should not read anything into that, because you know, he just went back to the land of his birth with his parents and they lived happily. Ever after. Perry did not go back. Perry stayed working in Australia his other brother Tony, until the police came knocking in twenty seventeen saying any chance of

a DNA test. Apparently, and we have to be careful here, it would appear that he wasn't happy to provide a DNA test, And it would appear that he left Australia soon afterwards, saying he was going back to Greece for a holiday. Well, that was fine. He went to Greece for holiday, which he may well have done every second year for years. But he did not return from Greece after his holiday. The other holidays that he may well have taken, he'd stay there for three weeks or six

weeks or whatever and come back. Not this time. He stayed there. Now that intrigued the police a lot. And we know it intrigued the police a lot because some six or seven years ago when that happened, there was a small leak, probably from homicide squad or from perhaps lawyers associated with extradition matters. It doesn't matter who, but someone somewhere leaked something back then, because what we know is that a former lawyer well known around Melbourne, very

well known around Melbourne. His former lawyer went along and boozy lunch sometime around that time in twenty seventeen. And after that nunch he came out and he made a phone call to a friend of his who was a crime reporter, and he told that person he said, they're looking at someone over Easy Street. You know, they're looking at somebody. Was suggested it, and that reporter contacted the homicide squad and said, this is leaked. You know it's leaking.

You better tell me what it's all about, and I'll keep it under my hat. I have to say, I am not that reporter with someone else, And the homicide squad obviously had its hand forced a little bit and said, yeah, well it's right, we are looking at somebody. But you just have to keep it quiet, because that's the way it is. We just have to wait our chance. And

for more than six years they waited their chance. And what they mean by that is that the Greek laws are such that you just can't send Australian police into Greece to extract a Greek citizen, which is what Perry Karumblis was. He was a dual citizen, but as a Greek citizen, he had certain rights as a Greek citizen. I don't think he could be arrested for an alleged crime that have been committed more than something like twenty

years earlier. I have read various versions of this, but would appear that if it was more than twenty years, they don't act on it. So the Australian police were hobbled by the Greek laws, and they realized that they had to sit quietly and say nothing and do nothing and alarm no one and hope that Perry Krumblis one day grew complacent enough to travel outside Greece to somewhere

that had an extradition treaty with Australia. And so the Australian police circulated around the world what can be called an Interpol wanted notice, and that meant that if this man Kurumblis, traveled outside Greece, that his presence would automatically be flagged when his passport went through another country's border. And that's what happened last week. As we're sitting here, last week in late September, he is arrested at the main airport in Rome because he was obviously attempting to

cross the border. He's either just flown in. I presume he'd just flown into Rome, or perhaps he was just flying out, doesn't matter which. They grabbed him. They contacted the Australian police and there it is the first big break in a double murder that has haunted Australia and particularly Victoria and particularly Melbourne for forty seven years. Now. We must emphasize that this is not solved. You know,

there's no proof that this man did these murders. It's just that this is the first actual arrest over these murders. And for the first time the friends and family, the few that are left of the dead women have actually seen some action from the authorities, because before this, for effectively a lifetime, there's just been in this appalling silence. It appears that whoever did it just walked out on the street and vanished. And so we're left now to

wait until Perry Columbus returns to Australia. The latest news is that he's willing to be extradited. He's not going to fight extradition. Apparently that's probably wise in some respects, because he might have been advised that ultimately extradition will happen, and that it might be more comfortable for him to let it happen, you know, sooner rather than later. Because I imagine that the Regina Colely pronunciation is difficult. But Regina Coaling Prison in Rome is not a good place

or a nice place to be. It'll be crowded, it'll be dirty, it'll be nasty, there'll be a lot of bad people there. He's not even you know, he's not in Greece, where he would know people or be able to speak the language and all the rest of it. In Rome, he would have no pool, he'd have no advantages,

and he might have some disadvantages. It would probably seem to him and to his family and to his lawyers that he would be better off back in Australia in the relative security and comfort of the remand in Melbourne to face the next episode of this unfolding story. In fact, I suppose it's conceivable that if he put up enough money, enough collateral, that he might even be able to get bail. But I imagine that would only be if he could put up millions of dollars of property or whatever, which

will be forfeited if he didn't appear. And so at this point we're waiting for him to get back, and then we're waiting to see how soon it is that the wheels of justice turn for Perry Karumblus, the accused in the haunting case of the Easy Street murders. How rusted on listeners will know that we've mentioned Easy Street before, and they're right. There is that episode the Horror at Easy Street. There's also returning to Easy Street where we spoke to the author Helen Thomas about her book which

is called Murder on Easy Street. And we also spoke to Helen Thomas another time about a separate but linked story in some ways, and that is Searching for Julianne. That is about the murder of Julianne Garcia Salai in nineteen seventy five. They're all available on your podcast feed. 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 news podcast's soul. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.