The killer and the thin blue line

I'm Andrew rule is his life in crimes. It's forty years since Raymond Ebens, mister Stinky was locked up in Penridg Prison. He was put there on remand for a terrible crime for the double murder of Gary Haywood and Abina Medill at Shepperton back in nineteen sixty six. So this Listeners is a man who was on the loose for nineteen years around Victoria and around Australia, and the fact is that he should have been caught in the

first few weeks. Our listeners, we have looked at the case of mister Stinky Raymond Edmunds several times before, but it's a long involved story with many aspects on What we didn't do on the other occasions was look at everything that the police did and also what they didn't

do today we do a bit of that. Currently, Raymond Edmonds is back in the news after all these years because he and others like Julian Knight and other high profile high security prisoners, it looks as if they will be moved to medium security prisons to make room for the rising number of young offenders who are going to be placed on remand instead of being grant to bail. And that is what makes this story more relevant this month than it was. I now propose to tell the

story of mister Stinky in not so many words. After the first round of interviews, they took the Quiet Killer to the remand Yard Pentridge for his first taste of the rest of his life. It was early nineteen eighty five and Raymond Edmonds had never been in jail before, and he's never been out of one since. They call him mister Stinky, and he's one of the damned, those destined to stay inside until they die or a so

frail they're beyond committing harm. He's eighty one now, the flabby old man who was once a cunning and ruthless predator, and so he's close to his use by date. Unlike some lifers if he's moved from a high security prison to make way for young remand prisoners hardly going to be a security risk. So it's exactly forty years since

Edmonds was locked up in Penridge the first time. He fronted the City Court on April the eighth, nineteen eighty five, be remanded back in custody to await the trial that would put him away for life with no parole. For almost twenty years, Edmonds had gotten away with a double murder that shocked Australia. He probably wouldn't have been caught at all, except that his twisted urges had driven him to rape dozens of women in Melbourne's Eastern suburbs over

fourteen years. Even then, he might have gotten away with it. What brought him undone was fingerprints, specifically the genius of those people who could memorize them, who could read fingerprints and recall them. That's what caught mister Stinky. At one of the rape scenes at Donvale in the nineteen seventies, the then unknown rapist left a print on a fly screen. With a little lark and some brilliant police work, the print was later matched with an unidentified partial print taken

from a car at Shepperton two decades earlier. The print on the car was found and kept secret after the abduction and murder of Sheperdon teenagers Gary Haywood and Abina Medil on a summer night in nineteen sixty six. Gary Haywood was eighteen. He was an apprentice in the family panel works. He was an apprentice panel beater. His father was a panel beater and his uncle owned the panel works, the biggest panel works in the Goblin Valley. I think

a Beena Medil was just sixteen. She'd left school just the previous year and had just spent the first few months of her first job working in the office at Haywood's panel works. Chance had brought these two workmates together at a pop concert at the Shepherdon Civic Center on that Thursday night, February tenth, nineteen sixty six. Older listeners will recall that this was just four days before the introduction of decimal currency. Decimal currency would come in on Monday,

February the fourteenth. This was four days earlier, so these two youngsters were abducted and murdered with pound shillings and pence in their pockets and by the time their bodies were found a couple of weeks later. The people that found them were carrying dollars and cents. That was right on the cusp of the new era in Australia, and this crime in some respects marked the end of innocence.

On that night, that Thursday night in Sheperdon, Gary's girlfriend, Gail didn't want to go out because it was the night before payday, and she assumed wrongly that he Gary wouldn't go out either, But she didn't know that he wanted to go out because he didn't tell her. He dropped her home after work and then away he went in his British racing green FJ Holden, which he'd done up himself for most beautiful car that everyone in Sheperdon

knew and many admired. Abina Medill's boyfriend, Ian Urkert was a mechanic at a local tractor dealership. He was working late that night trying to get a tractor running for a farmer or orchidist, and so he had to work late into the night, could not go to the pop concert with Abina, and probably that cost her her life. It was just one of those things because in the absence of Gary that was working. I went to the concert at the Sheperdon Civic Center. It was a very

big concert. Shep was a big place, still is a big place, but it was a place that ran big rock and roll events. At the civic center, two or three thousand teenagers would flock there from all over the River Arena, from the Murray River region, from Bendigo right over there, Yarrawonga. They would come to Shepperton to see pretty big acts in Norman Row would play there. MPD

Limited would play there. Eyvon Barrett would play there. A lot of nineteen sixties rock and roll and pop acts that appeared on television would end up performing at Shepardon because it really was one of the biggesttual centers outside the capitals. So on this night, while roadies unloaded the gear for four different acts that were playing that night, Gary Haywood tall, fair haired, charming, good looking, popular, popular

with girls. Popular with these mates, He persuaded a beaner and a friend of hers to drive around town in his immaculate FJ. Holden. They were probably pleased to be seen going around with him in his flash car. They just left school, and you know, he was a pretty

big deal. So it was all harmless teenage stuff until it wasn't because at some point that night and we don't have to chase every rabbit down every burrow here, but at some point that night they were parked next to Victoria Park Lake, which is the lake right in the middle of Sheperdon, and there are trees around at this parkland and it's a natural place to go park to look at the water and the sunset and all

that sort of good stuff. It was while they were parked there at some point in the evening that Raymond Edmonds, a young man of twenty two at this stage, abducted them at gunpoint and forced we imagine this is what he did. He forced Gary Haywood to drive the three of them to Murchison East, which is about thirty seven kilometers south of Sheperdon. It's quite a drive now. Merch East, as they call it locally, Merchison East is an area that was sort of between the old Highway, the Goblin

Valley Highway and the River Golbin. And particularly back in those days, that whole district that had lots of bush paddocks along the river. There were hundreds of acres along the river with river red gums on them. I think a lot of it might be crown land or parkland. And in those days local farmers would rent this land to run cattle in at certain times of the year. And it was to one of these places, one of these bush paddicks, that Edmonds forced Gary Haywood to drive.

Presumably Edmunds had been there before, it must have known where it was. There was what they call a cocky gate. That's just a little gate, not a real gate. It's just made up of little light posts and fencing wire. It was pulled down and they drove through. They left it down and they drove into the bush paddock. No one else knew that they were there. No one knew anything about that. Meanwhile, back in Sheperdon later that night, by about midnight, people are starting to panic. The Medill

family are very worried about Abina. She was supposed to be with her younger sister. They were supposed to be picked up by their father Fred, and Abuna's gone a Buna's missing. The Medile parents are obviously very worried. They're quite probably quite annoyed and angry. And then as the night wore on and there was no sign of her.

They became more and more fearful. Meanwhile, Ian Urkert, who is emotionally Abena's boyfriend, he's finished work, he's cleaned up, we got all the great and stuff off, had a shower, got changed and he and one of his mates has gone off to a particular cafe or whatever to wait for a beana to finish at the concert too, so he also is looking for a beaner. He hears from one of his other friends that she's been driving around with Gary Haywood and his mates. This makes him quite angry.

He goes around to I think Haywood's place, Similar goes around somewhere to a house in Sheperdon where he thinks Heywood might be, and he's saying things like I'll kill

that bastard, I'll kill him. He's not happy, and that threat, which is the sort of threat that a teenager is going to make about a rival boyfriend, was held against him for a long time because the police assumed later that he was the only person with a strong motive to harm Gary Haywood and have been a madill, and that fact screwed up the investigation for a long time. The night wears on sometime before dawn. Local policeman Frank Ayir as in e y A. Frank Air been a

copper around Sheperdon, forever, good bloke. Everybody knew him, everybody liked him. He is on night shift and he lives around the lake routine patrol, and he sees Gary Haywood's F J. Holden parked near the lake and he jumps out. This is just before dawn, it's quite early in the morning. He jumps out and he puts his hand in front of the radiator at the front of the seat. It's warm, and it wasn't. It was quite cold, which suggests that the car had been there for several hours, which makes sense.

We're thinking that when the bad thing happened around midnight, within half an hour, the car would be back in Sheperdon less than half an hour possibly and abandoned there probably by one am or something like that. And so by the time Frank Air gets to it, it's cold. But interestingly, the car is left open, it's not locked,

and it is parked crookedly. It's not neatly parked up against the curb with the front wheels angle correctly, It's been left very carelessly, and as soon as Gary Haywood's father and his brother saw it, they knew that something very bad had happened because they knew that there. Gary would not leave his car sitting there. He wouldn't park it like that, and he would not abandon it, and he certainly wouldn't leave town and run away without taking the car. And the other fact that goes to their

theory is that he was over to day's wages. Friday was payday. He's gone missing on a Thursday night. So there is no way that Gary Haywood He's going to skip town without his pay and skip town and leave his beautiful car that he spent hundreds of hours doing up. His family knew from that first few hours that something had gone tragically wrong, that if he wasn't dead, he was certainly being held against his will. Gary's girlfriend, Gail,

totally agrees with the Haywood family. She knew he wouldn't leave without the car. She knew he wouldn't leave without his pay. She never thought for a second that he'd run away from town. And so the initial police theories that you know, two young lovers have bolted were nonsense. They were never a goer, because what are they going to bolt in and what are they going to bolt with? No money, no car, crazy stuff. They were young, they

were teenagers, but they had regular jobs. They are from regular, hard working families. They weren't just going to run away from shepardon. They weren't the type. But the police initially didn't realize that. The first thing the police do is they drag in a Bena's boyfriend, Ian Urka, the young mechanic, and his best mate. They dragged them into the Shepherd and Police repeatedly, not just next day, but the day after that, and the day after that, and someone regularly.

And this is a pretty ugly scene because one of these local policemen is a detective called Peter Parkinson. That name is Peter Parkinson, and he was a smooth but very tough man. I met him when he was a middle aged man, about twenty years after these events, and by this stage he was a retired policeman. But you could see that he had been a pretty hard case. He'd started life Peter Parkinson up in the Riverina, I

think in farming district. He'd been a shearer who could win his share of fights in the local pubs against other shearers, and when the boxing tents came to town he could win fights with the gloves on. And then he joined the police force and rapidly became a detective. And that would be code for he was an old school detective who was a bash artist and didn't mind copying a quid of corrupt money. He was posted to Sheperdon interestingly earlier in the sixties after a stinting the homicide

squad in Melbourne. Now that may or may not mean anything. The posting might be as he said it was because he had a child that had asthma and that his family needed to move to a warmer climate where the asthma would not be such a problem. That may well be true, however, Interestingly, in the nineteen sixties, the Victorian homicide Squad was led by two men, one called Jack Ford, one called Jack Matthews, and they were crooks. They were crooks who had a big finger in the pie of

illegal abortions. Because abortions were illegal, there there was so much money to be made in performing illegal abortions, and the homicide Squad essentially franchised that because they could go easy on particular abortionists. That his doctors who would perform abortions for cash, providing they got kickbacks, and so effectively the homicide squad ran the abortion racket in Victoria, and

a very good racket it was. It was right up there, just behind sp bookmaking and very similar in some ways, very like the current tobacco shop shop shops, the illicit tobacco trade. And it might be that Peter Parkinson had been mixed up in that sort of stuff and then was transferred to sheperd and to get him out of the way. I don't know, but he certainly had a few bad habits. He tended to be more a bash artist and a standover man there then a sleuth, and

he was an opportunist. And when this happened, he said, well, I'm a local detective, I'm here at SHP, I know everybody. I also have had experience in homicide squad. And so they sort of made this guy the de facto head of the de facto investigation. Once all the homicide guys went back to Melbourne, Parkinson became the de facto leader

of the investigation and it didn't go that well. And it didn't go well because they really didn't run an investigation on scientific lines, or at least Parkinson did not. He was just keen on the idea that someone close to Gary Haywood must have done it or know something about it. And he thought, if he drags in Urkit, and he drags in Gary Haywood's mates, and he drags in other young people that knew other young people and belts enough of them that one of them is going

to tell him something that will lead to the killer. Now, that's fine if any of them knew anything. But they didn't because it wasn't one of them. It was not anyone to do with the dead kids. It was a total outlier, not someone from Melbourne or Sydney or from Queensland. But it was a total outlier. It was not one of their social group. It takes sixteen days for the bodies to be found, and in that time there is a great kerfuffle. It becomes the biggest story in Australia.

I would suspect I was. I was nine years old at the time that this happened, and I can recall the story in the newspapers, I can recall it on radio and television. It was certainly one of the biggest stories of my primary school years, and it was riveting because basically it was the sort of thing that didn't really happen much in Australia. Although it was only about two weeks after the Beaumont children met missing in Adelaide.

So in one summer in Australia, within the two weeks between Australia Day and the tenth of February, we've had two of the biggest abduction murders that have ever happened in this country. Despite all the searches that the police arranged, volunteers went out. They closed down I think one of the big canaries up there, and all the people went searching along the river banks. The local pony club has all got together and rode ponies and horses through bush.

Everybody who could went out searching for these kids, for the missing pair. Didn't find a thing. What happened is that two weeks later, on Saturday, the twenty sixth of February, two teenagers from Melbourne came up to Murchison. One of these two boys had a relative living at Murchison. His relative was a farmer and this young bloke and his mate,

his mate was I think Peter Jacobi. They would come up on the train from Melbourne from Spencer Street station as it was then known, and they would bring with them a twenty two rifle and a shotgun or something, as you used to do in those days, and they would go shooting on the relatives farm out at Murchison East, and they'd hop off the train at Murchison and they'd walk to the paddocks, the bush paddocks where they would

shoot rabbits and stuff. And when they got sick of it and got hungry and thirsty, they would go across the paddox to granddads or uncles or whoever it was. And on this day they're shooting away at rabbits and they smell something and then they find the body. They find a ben and Medill's body, which is a shocking thing. It's been in the summer heat for sixteen days. The body is only half closed, all the bottom garments are removed,

and she spread eagled on the ground. And of course all the flies and the ants and the animals have got involved in the body, so it's a terrible, terrible sight. The boys are shocked and distressed. They run across country, I think for probably almost two kilometers and raise the alarm with the relatives and with the local policemen. Local policeman comes down with the local farmer and the farmer says,

funny thing. I was down near that clump of saplings over there, a few hundred meters away the other day, and I smelt something dead and I thought it must be a dead kangaroo or a dead dog. Maybe somebody shot a dog. And the policeman said, doesn't sound good, and they headed over there, and sure enough, that's when they found Gary Haywood's body. Gary Haywood had been shot through the head. There was a neat bullet hole in

his head. And subsequently, when a site was searched by the forensic ballistics experts, they found I think two at least two twenty two shells that matched each other. And subsequently, of course, when the post mortems were done, they were able to retrieve the lead bullet or slug from Gary Haywood's skull, which forensics were able to examine and they could see the rifling marks on the bullet. They could

also check the firing pin marks on the shells. The police also found a small plastic what they call a beetle. It was a small piece of plastic trim from a particular sort of rifle. And by the time the experts looked at the bullet, the shells, and this piece of plastic, they were able to narrow down the search for a rifle or a make of rifle to a Mosburg semi automatic, probably what they call a model three point fifty two

K I think was called. But they were able to narrow it down to a very tight group of Mosburg twenty two rifles. So there were more than one hundred rifle makes in the police library, but within days they knew what sort of rifle they were looking for. Now, initially they kept that secret, but it was probably the best clue of all. Meanwhile, there is some other good police work happening. A lot of bad police work's happening, but there's some very good police work, and that is

Peter Parkinson, the bash artist detective. He did one good thing. He got Gary Haywood's FJ Holden and he carefully got in it without putting his hands everywhere, and he drove it to shed at the Shepherd And Police station and locked it up so that the forensic experts could come and have a good look at it. They came there, they dusted the whole car and they got several sets of prints. Now, the big thing with that is you

have to eliminate the prince. So they were able to eliminate Ben and Medill's prince, Gary Haywood's own prince, Gary Haywood's brothers, Allan's prince, Gary Haywood's father, I think, Charlie his prince, and even Gary Howood's girlfriend. Gail, the expert.

Fingerprint expert went out to see her at her place and she said, the last time I saw Gary, he'd dropped me off home here on that Thursday afternoon after work, and as he was backing out of the drive, I put my hands on the bonnet and pretended to push the car, and so my prince will be right there on the bonnet, and indeed they were. The fingerprinting expert found her prince and he said, that's great, you're the last set of unidentified prints on his car. And that

was a white lie. What he was doing was obscuring the fact that there was one other set of unidentified prints on the car, and it was that other set of unidentified prince that would help, many years later solve this whole murder and a series of rapes. It was a tiny, tiny pair of prints. It was just from two fingers, but it wasn't even the top of the fingers. It was the second joint down and it was just

a very small patch on the car. And they kept it secret that they had it, and that stayed secret for many years until the early nineteen eighties, when an enterprising reporter called Steve Ober managed to winkle the truth out of a New South Wales police contact O bar in two would hear just a tiny mention of something? He heard a senior policeman say something quietly to another reporter about Sheperdon and Obar, who was an American. I remember him quite well. He was a very popular figure

in journalism in Melbourne in those days. He was a tabloid expert. He worked for the Sunday Press and Steve Ober had contacts everywhere and he was very friendly with people. And he rang a policeman in New South Wales and said, I've just heard something about a case at Sheperdon and fingerprints.

Have you heard anything? The blug said, hang on a minute and checked with somebody, and he got back to Obar and said yes, indeed, a couple of Victorian detectives have been in Sydney looking out prints because they think they've got someone for rapes and maybe a murder, and so on and so forth. And Oba went with the story, a huge story that Sunday which made the connection that police had a fingerprint clue to the big nineteen sixty

six murders. Now that was true, but what a bummer for the police because the police at that stage in the eighties were hoping to keep it secret that they had the prints from the murder car. They were hoping to keep it secret that those prints had also turned up at rape scenes in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. It's that connection between the nineteen sixty six double murder and these rapes in Melbourne in the seventies and eighties.

That was the big link, the big connection, because it was through a brilliant piece of police work that they realized that their rapist from the eastern suburbs, a Donvale rapist they called him, was in fact probably the Shepherd and killer. They would not have known that if it had not been for a young, brilliant fingerprint man called Andy Wall. Now Andy Will was very young. He joined the police force after coming out from England as a youngster.

He came out with his parents. I think as a teenager. He hadn't even been in Australia when the murders happened in nineteen sixty six. He had never heard of those murders. Naturally, he joined the police force in the late seventies. He goes to the finger print branch because he's very good

at that sort of detail and he's extremely skilled at it. Now, this is the pre computer era, so the police, like everyone else in those days, relied on human brains, human memory to do things that now a machine will do. Andy Wall used to review prints from unsolved cases. They would have sort of like a top ten or top twenty list, and they'd say, this is this murder, this is that murder, this is this rape, whatever it might be,

and here's the prince of the unknown crook. And now and again he would flick through these prints and he would memorize them. And these particular ones associated with these particular prints which had come from Gary Haywood's car, were distinctive in some way that he was able to remember it. Now, this is an astonishing feat of memory and eyesight. Andy Wall was looking through some fresh princes that had come in from rapes in the Eastern suburbs. This is early eighties.

When he goes that looks for me that don Vale rape. These princes have found on a fly screen at don Vale. They remind me of something and he goes, oh, I know, and he goes over to the drawer where they keep all their old stuff and he flicks her and he pulls out the secret prints from Gary Haywood's car, which had been in that draw years before Andy Will even

arrived in Australia. But he'd somehow memorized them. He was able to make the connection across all that time and space, and it was him who made the link, and that is the link that ultimately caught the man who became known later as mister Stinky for reasons we will shortly explore. Bottom line is fingerprint work brilliant normal cop work at Sheperdon no good at all because the other really good clue the police had, but they muffed it was the

Mosburg rifle. Now, what they did was eventually they publicized the fact that they were looking for Mosburg semi automatic. That was good, probably, but what it meant was that it brought in hundreds of tip offs, leads, whatever, people getting in touch on all over Australia and saying, I know, Bill Smith, he's got a Mosburg. You know my brother in law's got a Mosberg, and he's also got cross eyes,

you know, all this stuff. And eventually it was very confusing because when the police contacted the Mosburg factory or manufacturers in America, they said, oh, no, we've only exported one hundred and fifty of those semi automatics to Australia. Well that was true, the Mosburg factory had only exported one hundred and fifty to Australia. But what they didn't realize was that independent dealers had brought in hundreds of others.

There were many hundreds of them, not thousands, but many hundreds, and so over some months the police had volunteered to them I think three hundred and fifty two or three

hundred and fifty three Mosburg semi automatics. And what they would do they would come to Sheperdon one way or another and the police would have a bucket of water under the fire stairs outside and they would shoot a bullet into the bucket of water and then they would keep the shell and they would retrieve the slug, and they would hand it over to the ballistics experts to look at the marks on them. And they were able

to eliminate those three hundred and fifty three mossbergs. Well, that's all very well, and that's wonderful, But their problem was they needed the mossbergs that weren't being handed in. They needed to find the people that had one who wasn't turning up to have it tested. And here is where they made a shocking basic error. Okay, gun laws were fairly lax and open in those days, sure, but there was a basic rule that is that gun dealers selling new and used guns had to have a gun

dealer's book. They still have to have one, and every time they sell one, they have to write in it what it is, serial number, description, and the full name and details of the buyer. Now, if every gun dealer has that book, it's a pretty good mud map of who's got what gun out there in the world. Every dealer in Victoria should have such a book, or did have such a book. The police, in their wisdom or lack of it, looked only at gun dealers books in

Sheperdon or Sheperdon and Marupna or locally. Essentially, they didn't

go any further. Had they gone across the highway and up a valley or two to other districts up in the northeast such as Bright and Myrtleford and those other places Banella and these places are only you know, within an hour hour and a half drive, not that far, they would have found a sports store at Myrtleford that had sold a Mossburg semi automatic model K back a few years earlier, like in the late fifties, so only eight years earlier, something like that, seven years earlier to

a man called Edmunds, a man called Harold Edmonds, who was the father of Raymond Edmonds. And had they done that in those first few weeks and tracked down mister Edmunds Senor and said where's that rifle, he would obviously have had to say, well, my son owns that rifle. I gove to him, and he's a chief armer at

Ardmona near Shepherd. And at that point the police would get very interested and they would go over and knock on the door at MNA and say where's Raymond Edmunds, and where's his rifle, and that would have just about solved the whole thing then, But they didn't do that. They didn't do that, they didn't go through the gun dealer's books, and so a very strange thing happened. Somebody did go out to the farm where Raymond Edmunds was working.

Raymond Edmonds was a young cheer farmer. He was out on a farm at Ardmona was owned by people called Gorn, and he share farm. That meant he lived in a house on the property. He would milk the cows for the people and I would split the milk check every month of Salaga. You're not on wages, you're co farming. And Edmunds had grown up milking cows around the place and in You're a bit about farming and so on. He had lived at Mona since about nineteen sixty three

with his very young wife. He was very young himself, but his wife, Leslie was even younger, and they had three tiny little kids, all close together. And he was a moody, brutal, nasty piece of work. But he was also a few other things. He was physically very strong. The Gorn family remembered that had a heavy duty trailer there that they could hook behind a tractor or behind a truck, and that he could lift the toe bar of it quite easily, and it took two other men

to do it. He was a crack shot, very good shot, and he had a semi automatic rifle. Now, some months before the murders, young Stuart Gorn, son of the farm owner, had rushed over and knocked on the door of the sheer farmer's house and said, Ray Ray you're there. I've just moved the pig stye and he's a heap of rats there. Can you get your rifle and we'll shoot the rats. Now, this is what people on farms do.

You've moved something at a pig stye, you move haystack, stuff like that is going to be rats and snakes and rabbits and all sorts of things, and what you do is shoot them. And normally Stuart Gorn, who was a teenager, and this young cher farmer Raymond Edmonds, would grab guns rifles and they would shoot things with great glee.

But on this particular occasion, and this was some months before February nineteen sixty six, ray Edmond said no, no, no, just closed the door on him, and that was very interesting because normally he would have been very keen, but on this occasion he closed down the whole topic of shooting. And years later, when the truth all came out, it turns out that there's a good reason for that, and the good reason was he had sorn the barrel of he's twenty two. Raymond Edmonds had sworn off his own

twenty two. And that, of course, is something that no legit farmer does. It is a criminal act committed by somebody who wants to hide their weapon in a coat pocket or in a car door or something like that, so that it's easily hidden, easily transportable, and can be used to do bad things like rob people or hold them up or whatever. And so the fact that Raymond Edmonds owned a Mosburg rifle was just one of the

greatest clues of all time. A policeman did go out to the farm at Gorn's at Mona about seven weeks after the murders. What we don't know is why that policeman did that. I did once speak to this policeman. His name was Joe Ogden. He ended up living at Banella and he died there a few years ago. Good wealth respected he told me that he couldn't remember anything about any of it, which might be true, but clearly there'd been some form of tip off, and that would

be one of two things. Probably he'd either been told that a young fellow called Edmunds lived at Mona and he had a Mosbog rifle, or he'd been told that Edmunds drove a new Falcon Sedan, which he did a red Falcon, and that Sudan might have been seen around town at the appropriate time of the murders. Probably they would be the most likely things to make a policeman

go out to check Ray Edmonds. But when he gets there in probably May or June of nineteen sixty six, and he asks where Ray Edmonds is Raymond Edmunds by name, he had his name that would indicate car registration or the gun dealer's book, one or the other. You'd think the Gorns the owner said, oh, he's left. He left us suddenly, Oh yeah, where's he gone? Oh, come in here and we'll show you. So he walks in to the office at the Gorns farm and they look in

their book and there it is. He's moved up to may Rung, which is near Finley, New South Wales working for people called Clark at a farm called Sunny Banks or Sunny whatever. And there it is. There's the address, there's the name of the farmer's phone number. It's all there now. Finley, of course, and may Rung. Finley is in New South Wales. It's just over the Murray River. It is only one hundred and thirty nine kilometers from Sheperdon, which is funnily enough, about one hour and a half

driving time. It wasn't that far away. But it is a different state and a different jurisdiction. Now. Had Raymond Edmonds moved south, had he gone to Hamilton or to Gippsland, probably they would have looked him up. But what happened was Joe Ogden, old copper, said oh, I'll get the boys up there to look him up, no worries, and that did not happen. What we don't know is is

what went wrong. Did Ogden get in touch with the New South Wales Police They didn't help this, didn't go and check, or did the New South Wales Police go out to the farm up at Finley Mayrong and find Raymond Edmunds working away milk and cows and interview him about whatever was that your red falcon or where's your rifle or something? And possibly they did, and possibly Raymond Edmunds just told them a good lie and got away

with it because he was a pretty clean liar. And if he'd said something like, oh, yeah, I did have a rifle like that, but you know, I lost it three years ago, I sold it to a bloke or whatever that might have been. That we will never know what really happened there. But what we do know is the police did have Raymond Edmond's name in Sheperdon in the weeks after the murders and it all went wrong.

They never nailed him. What went wrong? Well, whatever it was, it cost more than thirty women peace of mind because they were savagely raped in very distressing circumstances. Because Edmonds became a prolific rapist. He would hide in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. He would hide and wait and watch. He would sometimes crawl under people's houses and he would know when young wives. He would pick young wives with little kids, usually whose husbands would work night shift or

were away. He would know what they were doing. He would hear them talking. He would watch the husband's drive off to go to work, and then he would strike. And the implication always was that if there were little children in the house, that he might hurt the children if the children's mothers did not go along with him. And so he was very predatory, very ruthless, very cunning, and very frightening. There's no doubt that he raped more than thirty women, and it might be, you know, sixty,

it might be seventy. We will never know how many women he attacked in the many years that he was on the loose, because he was on the loose for nineteen years between the murders and his ultimate arrest. Ultimately, he was charged only with five of those rapes and convicted of five of them. In recent times they've added some more to it, probably not all of them. So

how did he finally get arrested? Well, in the end, he was sort of like the shark who jumps into the boat, because what happens is in early nineteen eighty five, a shop assistant in Albury, just over the border in New South Wales, looks out and sees a man exposing himself in a car parked in the street in the middle of a busy morning in Aubury. She rings the

local police. The police turn up. They grab this bloke who's just a bloke in overalls or something and he's fell con station wagon or whatever, and they take him down to the cop shop in Aubury, New South Wales police and because it's New South Wales, they automatically fingerprint him, which is not what happens in Victoria. In those days you didn't get printed automatically, but in New South Wales

she did. Had he done this across the river three minutes away in Wodonga, he would not have been fingerprinted. But it's Aubrey. They print him fine. The princess sent to the Central Database Registry Fingerprint Bureau, which is in Sydney, I think it was. It's up north somewhere, it doesn't matter where, and there routinely a fingerprint person looks at it and he goes, hang on, I can match this up. That's that one they're looking for. That's the one that's

mixed up with the murder and rapes Invictoria. And he holds it up. The next thing, he gets in touch with his people, and his people get in touch with the Victorians, and the Victorians go, oh my goodness mate, because in Victoria they had a task force looking for

mister Stinky. They had several detectives working on it. They had a database full of names from gas bills and electricity bills and every database you can think of, because computers were just coming in and they thought they were going to find him eventually by working out who lived at Sheperdon in the sixties, who'd moved to these other places east of Melbourne where the rapes were in the seventies and eighties, and that eventually they would work out

who was on that list and they would interview them all and find the bad guy. And they probably would have had they been given enough time, but they didn't have to because Raymond Edmonds exposed himself in Aubury and so in the end what happened was the task force that had spent months looking for him just went around and knocked on his door down in a bayside suburb of Melbourne where he was working in a small factory I think making gates of fences or something, and they

rested him. And that was I think Friday, the twenty second of March of nineteen eighty five, which is forty years ago, and the rest, as I say, is history. He ends up planning guilty and he gets sentenced to life with no parole. And on this occasion, on this occasion, that has worked. Unlike the puzzling case of Lowry and King in the Roslyn Naughty Murders, mister Stinky Raymond Edmonds has stayed under lock and key all these years. He's

now eighty one. He's still in there and I think he'll stay there until he comes out in a pine box or on a walking stick. 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 Heraldsun dot com dot au forward slash andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot au.

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