Casefile Presents: The Easey Street MurdersFor decades, the common misconception was there had been no witnesses to this double homicide. Yet, there were people living in the street who saw and heard things on the night Susan and Suzanne died and in the days that followed that could have proved significant. One was right next door. Police failed to interview any of them at the time.
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For more than forty years. There have been many misconceptions about the murders and Easy Street. At the top of this list was a widely held view that one of the homicide squad's initial suspects was the killer, and journalists in Melbourne talked openly about one of their colleagues being the murderer. They were wrong. The introduction of DNA quickly disproved this so called theory, but it also meant that it took twenty years for the crime reporter's name to be cleared what must have been an ordeal by any standard. There was also another significant misunderstanding about this case seven years ago when I started researching it for the book Murder on Easy Street. The same year a million dollar award was posted for information in the double homicide. It was accepted as fact that no one had seen or heard anything on the night that two women died, or in the days and nights that followed before their bodies were finally found by next door neighbor ALONEA Stevens. It was always hard to believe. Surely someone had noticed something that made them uneasy at the time. Then again, surely detectives working the case in the decades that followed would have found anyone who'd seen something, but the official narrative remained the same. There were no witnesses, end of story. Yet it wasn't. In fact, this is a story in itself because no less than three people had something to share with police, and two are still alive. Back in nineteen seventy seven, twenty one year old Peter Sellers was living in his family's home at one three nine Easy Street. His father had been born in the house, so the family were true Collingwood Stalwarts.
I knew the area really well. Yeah. We used to walk the streets of the night and there was no no hassles, no nothing. You just did what you had to do. There was ay in Greece. Australians all up and down the street, and we all grew up with each other for ten years or so.
And you went to school there obviously primary in high school.
Yes, we went to Victoria Park Primary School and then went to Vitual High School. Then pursued a job as an apprentice jockey.
The night the two women were killed, his parents and sister were away on holiday, so Peter and his mate Ray, who has since passed away, were up late. They stayed up till about two thirty that Tuesday morning, January eleventh, nineteen seventy seven, and that's when they heard three very distinct loud noises.
And then we're watching movies, having to drink or so, and it's about two thirty. Ray slept on the couch. I went up to my bedroom was at the front of the house and just hop into bed and there was a bang, the front door closing, and two car doors in rapid succession closing, and the car just sped off up towards my street. Yeah, seek back, and at the time he go, you know what was that? I had to look out the window. Was it going outside to find out? But yeah, I just took off. And the next morning I got up and I said to Rage, hear the noise? He said yeah, he said it was that loud you could not hear it. So during that day I never gave another thought.
Two more days and nights would pass before the girl's bodies and young Gregory were found. But the next night, Wednesday, January twelve, Peter Seller saw three people, two men and a woman, standing out front of the two suits house us more specifically, in front of the service lane that ran alongside it.
On the Wednesday, Mom and dad and my sister and husband Johome from Queensland. I was home waiting about eight thirty at night and I heard a car door and I thought it was them. Walked out the front and the step at the front of the house is high so you can see down the street, and there was a dark haired guy standing that where the gutter and the laneway met with the laneway between the two houses. Fair haired guy standing at the entrance to the laneway, and he was onto a dark haired girl. It was a minute or so then they kissed each other on the treek. She turned and walked towards Hoddle straight and he turned and walked up the lane way and then there the lame way backs onto my house. So I walked out into the backyard and my dog, Sindy, she's just running around wagon her tail, no care in the world. So I thought that's fine, walked back out the front and no one was there. They were all gone.
So when you say you saw one of the guys walk up the lane rate not the other guy.
No, I didn't. As soon as the other guy turned to walk up the lame way, I walked inside to the backyard. So I don't know where the other guy actually went up the lame way. I don't know, and.
You were just checking the security aspect of it.
Yes, I didn't know where he was going. I didn't know who he was, And because the lame way backed onto the house, I just wasn't too sure.
His family got home in the early hours of the next day, so he didn't get a chance to mention anything to his parents until he got home from work on that Thursday afternoon.
And I didn't know anything had happened until I finished work. And back then the old milk bars had the signs out the front with the headlines on it and murder, and that's when I read all about it. But I went got shires to be honest. So I seen these two guys. I didn't know who they were. So I walked home and as I got around the corner of the people were so I walked on the other side of the road and then into the house. Why to get away. There was reporters and everybody there, and I saw guys who I didn't know who they were, So I my lot not happy. So I walked inside and I said the mum and my dad. I think I may have seen them.
The next day, while he was at work, Peter says, two detectives came to his house looking for information that Easy Street residents might be able to give them. Peter says his mother, father, sister, and his brother in law were virtually interrogated by the homicide team.
Why because when they come home, they actually drove into the laneway and reversed out to park the car, and they wanted to know what they saw. And of course there were reports there was a light on in the kitchen. My sister, who passed away two years ago, will state until then that when they pulled into the lame way, there's no light on in the kitchen at all. She's quite adamant. And yet when the police turned up, there was a light on the kitchen, So that's another mystery. And then they said that mum was anybody else's home. Mum said, my son was home, and they wrote my name down, Big Astros, and they said we'll be back tonight to interview him. Until this day, I haven't seen them.
And what does that make you think, Peter? I mean, why wouldn't they come back and talk to you?
The main reason I got they were focused on one person and one person only, the boyfriend from what I can remember back and everybody else's the police had blinkers on, to be honest, that's my thought of it, that they were after one person and one person only.
For more than four decades, Peter Sellers waited for homicide to contact him to learn what he heard and saw in the street that week of the murders. He's not embarrassed to say he was scared. He truly believed he'd seen the killers. But in twenty seventeen, at the urging of his late sister Robin, he finally reached out to police and ran crime stoppers. With the cold case back in the news again on its forty year anniversary and Robin on his tail, he felt he had no choice.
So I rang him up and you put on hold, and I'm waiting and waiting, and I started sweating, sweating, and I thought, you know, I'm not the guilty one here. But they come on. So I started explaining everything. They were very quiet on the phone, last me if what I saw what I heard. Then they waited for me. I reckon to give him a name, and I couldn't. I don't know who they were or that is there anything else? And the version wasn't a lot, so I hung.
Up to this day, Peter Sellers believes more than one person was involved in this case, and he can't forget what he heard earlier that morning in Easy Street.
The front door slam and within seconds two car doors bang bang, and then the car sped off. Whit's on heading up towards Smith Street. And that will never leave me, and till this day, until I die, I'm convinced there were two killers, not one totally to me. No one said they hurt anything, but I was four doors away and that was as loud as anything. Now, other people must have heard it.
Surely a lot of people listening to this are probably thinking, yeah, but you know, such a long time ago, it's nearly five decades ago. Has it grown bigger in your mind? Have I've you know, really exaggerated it?
No, not one bit. I can close my eyes and hear exactly what happened, and the seconds between the door, the two car doors and the car taking off. It was me, mum, Never forget it.
A written statement sent to me by the Victoria Police Media Office in the run up to this podcast said investigators will talk to Peter Sellers in the future. The good news is they have, and we'll get to that in more detail later. Yet they ignored him for forty five years. A man now sixty six, who not only heard something unusual on the night of these murders, but who saw three people outside the so called murder house some thirteen hours before the women's bodies were found. Given that, what do we make of another neighbor's claim, A woman who lived across the road from the Sellers in Easy Street and says she heard a man's voice later that same night, saying the teachers had been killed. Christina for Tourists came to Easy Street in nineteen seventy and has lived there ever since. The knowledge in Arean loves the suburb, but is still troubled by that strange snatch of conversation she heard that night she was in bed with her husband when a man walked past their house, apparently talking to someone else.
I am not sure, drim or someone passed the middle of the night and says, somebody kill the two teachers tonight. I work up in the morning, I say to my husband, to my kids, because I have boy a yell, something happened, someone passed or dreamer.
I'm not sure.
When I walk well outside, I.
Saw so many people down there, police people come, and so what happened on there?
Give the two teachers what?
Yes, Detectives never knocked on Christina's door as they gathered information after the murders or in the years since. To be fair, she never expected them to, nor has the retired machinists try to report what she heard, assuming that have just dismissed her as quote, a crazy Greek woman unquote. But the more she's thought about it over the decades, the more she believes that what she heard wasn't a dream. It was a man talking as he walked past her house.
Not dream.
Maybe somebody walk in the street and he had that.
If I did outside still it was dark. I can't nice.
Yes, I can't tell.
You one tall susan.
I think the other one kelly hair beautiful, not to fix it, just border with kel hair and have big dog like this one dog with long hair playing with her Greg always outside.
But the dog I think very friendly and not why or otherwise he tried to do something.
Did you hear anything on the night I died?
Which was a couple of only this one the night this one.
Somebody say, kill the two teachers tonight.
While Christina for Tourist's officially undocumented claim is disconcerting and Peter Seller's experienced troubling, what happened to the most important witness in this case borders on implausible, indeed intolerable. Gladys Coventry lived next door to the two suits with her husband Clive, on the other side of the service lane in one four five Easy Street, and on that awful summer evening in nineteen seventy seven, she was sitting up alone in her launde room and late that night she saw a man in the house next door. I first heard this incredible story when I spoke to the late Brian Murphy, one of Australia's more colorful detectives, who died just before this podcast was finished. The former Armed Robbery Squad veteran mentioned it almost in passing when I rang to ask what he knew about the murders. He'd never worked in homicide, but I expected him to have a unique perspective on the historic investigation. He did, but what he told me was confounding.
Yes, I remember telling her that somebody had information that this particular woman had looked across into the house where the murders took place and she saw a person washing bloodstained clothing out, and that the police heard about it and they wanted to send a policeman in. But she had a dislike to policeman, not a hatred, but a dislike because she'd most probably gone through tough times as a lot of people in those working classes areas did, and had a certain opinion of the police, and she didn't want to trust anybody.
I think she tried to tell them initially, didn't.
She apparently so, Yes. But the funny part about it was they sent a doctor in. He was bigger than the average wishman and had a most authoritative voice, and he went in. She sh'd d're a copper, get out. I don't want to talk to you, and I think basically that's what I told you.
To be honest, it was pretty hard to process what Brian the Skull Murphy told me during our first conversation on the phone. Could police really have failed to take such a potentially important witness seriously? Peterhiscock, one of the first detectives on the scene, didn't work on the case long enough to be able to shed light on this apparent conundrum. But Murphy, who had two books written about his controversial career, had little doubt about what happened. He believed that when seventy two year old Gladys Coventry approached police, they effectively dismissed her. Then, days later, realizing she was probably their best lead in terms of trying to identify the killer, they went back to her house and tried to talk with her. But by that stage, it seems missus Coventry had had enough.
Some police would have an opinion of themselves and they knock to go and crawl to somebody asked them, please tell me a million different ways of getting an information out of people, and those skills are very few and far between. As a policeman, I would have kissed her feet if you told me something like that, it's just gold.
It was truly an astonishing revelation, but could it be verified? With Victoria's homicide squad rebuffing all my written and verbal requests for an interview about the case, retired Detective Murphy's very specific cold case tale spurred me into doing my own doorknock in Easy Street to see if there was anyone who knew Gladys Coventry and perhaps had even heard her. As it happened, there was. When I knocked on the door of one three nine Easy Street, ironically Peter Seller's family home for so long, I met retired history teacher Hugh Parry Jones, and he quickly revealed that not only had he known missus Coventry, he'd actually discussed the murders with her. The two neighbors started chatting over her rickety side fence as Hugh cleared out his new backyard, using the lane to position his skip for the rubbish. What she disclosed still perplexes him.
Well, she told me that she was sitting there at the window because it was a hot night, and that's how she kept cool in her house with the back door open. And she said she saw a bloke leaving out the back gate, where he turned sharply towards the street. My thoughts are that as a possibility, he could have seen her from the same position if her lights were on, or the moon was shining in her window or whatever. So she herself was possibly in some sort of danger, but that was it. She saw him turn and leave with a knife in his hand.
Yep, And when she told you, that, what was your initial response?
Ah?
Yeah, I was very shocked, because I'm sure I said to her, well, I'm sure you told the police, and she said that they weren't very interested in what she had to say. I think she was very disappointed in the reaction and behavior of the police, who didn't seem to want to give her any credit.
Did you believe her?
Absolutely? I didn't see that she had any reason to make it up. She seemed pretty genuine and solid in her memories of the events and was only too happy to tell me when I pressed her. I had no idea that when I was talking to her, I was finding out stuff that was not in the public domain. I just assumed I'd missed that evidence because it seemed such a bombshell.
Of course, it was a bombshell, and the second version of what Gladys Coventry saw on the night Susan and Suzanne were killed. Clearly, they were two very different accounts, but they shared the most crucial point. She'd seen a man in the house the night or early morning of the double homicide. And now finally we've uncovered missus Coventry's own explanation of what she saw in quite precise detail, In other words, the actual buried lead of this story within a story. But finding it wasn't easy. Just as Hugh Parry Jones was astonished by what she told him, her immediate family was stunned when what she'd witnessed came to light in Murder on Easy Street, my book that was published in twenty nineteen. Initially, her granddaughter tried politely to convinced me that it just wasn't true that I had been misled lied to. Yet after much discussion over many months, she and her siblings came to accept that it was correct and there was more to this family saga. Since reading the book a couple of years ago, Gladys Coventry's grandchildren have been searching for a newspaper report they suddenly remembered seeing around the time of the killings. They were adamant the paper ran a photo of their grandma on the front page. They just couldn't find the copy their late mother had kept tucked away for so long, or remember which paper it was in. Was it the Old Herald or Son the Age, or maybe a local paper from where they lived in the country, or even the bi weekly truth. It was baffling and kind of drove them crazy. I couldn't find it either, and none of the crime journals and former detectives I spoke to who were steeped in this history recall ever having seen it. But Gladys Coventry's granddaughter finally uncovered it, or at least her husband did. This discovery followed the Victoria Police media unit sending me an email unexpectedly really after so many years, imploring them to discuss Gladys Coventry's role in this saga, revealing the detectives had taken her statement on February eleventh, nineteen seventy eight. Not only does this confirm that they didn't talk to her formerly until a year after the two women were murdered, it also came after a veteran crime reporter interviewed her first. Because the newspaper story that Missus Coventry's grandchildren remembered seeing was in truth. On January twenty eighth, nineteen seventy eight, an old fashioned scoop by Joerno Jack, ailing no doubt to coincide with the first awful anniversary of the young women's deaths. I saw man with girls, screamed the tabloid's misleading from page headline. Watch them for fifteen minutes, and yes there was Gladys Coventry's photo on two pages in the paper. Now, while she's willing to discuss this unexpected chapter in her family history, Missus Coventry's granddaughter doesn't want is to use her real name. The killer, after all, is still free, so we'll call her Melanie, and she believes her Nana's long lost interview sheds new light on this cold case.
I think it's illuminating to the situation for both the girls and my grandmother. On that night. We didn't have the details of what Nana was doing and saying to the police. But indeed, it feels as though, when you know, I look at this article, that she may have tried to speak to the police and wasn't respected. It is hard to know, but maybe this article has eventuated because it's around that, you know, one year anniversary, and someone has thought to go and talk to my grandmother.
What does surprise her is that it was a reporter from a newspaper, specifically truth.
I don't know how it eventuated that, you know, she spoke to journalists from The Truth. I just feel that she may not have been fully aware that she was going to be on the front page of The Truth, and it wasn't a popular paper in the household at the time.
But the thing that's interesting is when you were growing up as kids, you'd obviously seen her in the paper, but did you know what it was about.
I personally think that we were very shielded. I think when that article came out, and I know that my siblings said that they actually found it. I saw it in the newsagents and my mother told them to run back and buy it. It was brought home and I certainly saw the front page, but I think that paper was actually sort of taken away and the details were not revealed to us. I think also it reflects that there was a worry. There was a worry for my grandmother, There was a worry for us that you know, we would feel stressed by the situation and be afraid, and I think that we were being protected.
I asked though, because remember when you were you and I met for the first time, was when the book Murder an Easy Suit was launched, and you came and said, where did you get that story about Missus Coventry because it's not right. And I said, well, this is you know where I got it from. You you said, will know she's my grandmother, and that's not right. So in a sense, even though you saw the story, because you hadn't talked about it as a family, it was a story kept secret within your family.
Absolutely. And you know, I even read this article, and there's things in this article that you know, I was not aware of. I think it actually had been deliberately kept secret from us.
We'll never know how long reporter Jack Ailing spent with Gladys Coventry. Yet, while the interview itself wasn't all that long, the detail the older woman gave him about the man she saw with Susan Bartlett was vital. He was tall, had dark hair, and was wearing a short sleeved shirt, not surprising really, given it was such a hot night, and he seemed at ease in the house with Sue. To some extent. The fact that Missus Coventry was willing to finally put this on the record must have been due to the journalists putting her it is too. This doesn't surprise Elona Stevens, who lived on the other side of the two suits house and found their bodies three days after they were killed. Working a truth at the time, Alona remembers Jack Ailing well.
Police rounds and crime with his section, and he'd have been in his fifties, but typical old school journo.
And when missus Coventry saw him, I mean, would he have just come to the door, knocked on the door and asked her talk to her?
Well, that's really interesting. I imagine he would have. You know, he would have had a presence about him, you know, a professional style presence that would have probably she would have reacted to like any other professional. He had a terrific voice, actually he had one of those lower melodious voices. And he would have come across as a very as an educated, sensible, older person, someone she could trust.
Her granddaughter Melanie thinks or suspects that that maybe her Nan thought she was talking to the police when Jack Ailing arrived at the door, that maybe she thought he was a detective finally coming back to talk to her, because as we remember, she tried to tell them that she'd seen this guy in the house, you know, the day you found the bodies, but they dismissed her is that possible. Could he have been mistaken for a detective look?
He could have physically, well, he'd have certainly been dressed like one, because that was just the classic mode of dress in those days, dark suit, white shirt and tie. And as I said, he had that older man presence that you know, a professional person would have, and so it wouldn't be unusual for her to assume that given the questions he was asking. But that's what it was.
You made an interesting observation, I mean, as an old journalist, as a former journalist, when you looked at the way Missus Coventry was photographed, what does that say to you?
Yeah, it immediately says to me that she didn't really know she was being photographed. She was busy talking, probably to Jack, and the photographers just gone, yeah, this is a good click, click, click, because not in those old days, the cameras were different and he could stand away and do that and she probably wouldn't have noticed. But both photos, the front page photo and the page two photo both looked to me as if she's focusing on something else, not on having a photo taken.
Having said all that, to be fair, this interview actually pushes or could have pushed the investigation forward, had they spoken to her properly the year before. She describes the man in some detail. He was tall, he had dark hair, not black hair, but dark brown hair. He was there, obviously for a while, and very relaxed. With Susan Bartlett. This is not just a fleeting glimpse.
No, And the description is you'd have to say authentic and authorized because she goes into such detail. This is not Oh, I think I saw someone who may or may not have. I was certain I saw it. This is a year later, so I mean, I'm imagining had a fair bit of information the day after, which the police didn't bother to follow up.
And the other thing, of course, it's blindingly obvious, is if they'd had this description a year earlier, or even at this point in nineteen seventy eight, and released it and also got her to sit down with a sketch artist and draw on a composite, you know, a little identicit sketch. I mean, how important would that have been, do you think?
Oh?
I think incredibly important, because she would appear to be the only eyewitness, and even if it's in the dark from ten feet away, she's still an eyewitness. And would still have remembered something, which is, as you know, Helen, it's always sat with me that I should have remembered something and I simply can't. But she was there and she saw something, So you know, it amazes me that the police didn't do anything about it.
As Elona Stevens describes him, the veteran crime journe, it was quite a character, not unlike Melanie's grandmother by all accounts.
Physically, she was very short person. She lost her hair early in life, so she wore a wig. So she was fairly distinctive character. And I'm pretty sure that most of the people in the street knew her. She tended to wear the same sort of trench coat and trudge along the street with a little trolley behind. And she, as I said, she was deaf, or reasonably deaf if she needed to be. She was very deaf. And she would very classically ignore anybody she did not want to communicate with, and she'd go out of a way to communicate with people that she did want to chat with. I know that she had friends across the road, Ruby and Jim, and I don't know what happened to Ruby, and but you know, there might have been people next saw that she would never speak to because she chose not to. She would be a classic character in a novel.
A little bit like Via she does.
Actually, she looked a bit like Vera too.
And like Vera Stanhope, the fictional British detective. She was on the case very early that Tuesday morning, January eleventh, nineteen seventy seven. She told the reporter that she'd gone to bed the night before at about ten, but awoke at two am, probably because it was so hot. She got up and walked towards the back of her house, and that's when she saw Sue talking to a tall man with dark hair. Melanie's happy to read her nana's words.
They were very nice girls, very quiet and kept themselves. I went to bed on the in the front room at about ten o'clock that night night. It was a very warm evening. I don't know what happened, but I woke up at about two o'clock. I got up and went down the hallway in the darkness, on the way to the kitchen to get a glass of water or something. As I passed through my lunge room, I saw light was on in the room. In the house opposite. The blind was up about eighteen inches. I sat down in the lounge chair in the darkness. It was cooler there. I looked across and could see Miss Bartlett and a man in the room. Miss Bartlett and a man were sitting at each end of a small table near the window. I could hear music playing. It was very loud. They were talking and laughing and drinking out of little glasses. They couldn't see me because I was in the dark. Miss Bartlett was wearing a long colored kaftan dress. It had white sleeves. She often wore these sorts of dresses, and they used to see her in the street. The man was very tall. He had dark hair, but not black, it was sort of brown. She goes on to describe what he was wearing. She says, I must have watched them for fifteen minutes. They didn't get up to change any of the music. I think it was coming from one of those high fi things. I saw them both stand up. They moved towards each other, and when they were close, Miss Butler put her arms around the man's neck. I thought they were going to kiss, but the man didn't put his arms around her. She kept her arms around him for a little while, and then they sat down again. They didn't kiss. I then got up and went to bed.
So it's quite a detailed recollection, isn't it. It certainly is an eyewitness account.
Absolutely, and as I said, she could see well. There was nothing wrong with her eyesight and there was nothing wrong with her interpretation of situations. What does it mean?
The Lattice Coventry came to Australia when her family migrated from England. She was eight or nine at the time. She eventually married Melanie's grandfather and they had one child, her mother, before he died. She remarried years later, and that's when she moved to Easy Street with her new husband and longtime Collingwood resident, Clive Coventry.
He had lived there, I think most of his life, I think, except maybe born in Tasmania from memory, and he lived there with his mum I think alone, but I can't be sure of that. And his mother died and then he married my grandmother and she moved in and she would have been how old she would have been, in the sixties, I guess when she moved in there. I think they were quite happy living there doing you know, the things that older old people in their sixties to. So, yeah, just sort of watching the horse races and you know, minding their own business around Collingwood, popping up to the hotels on occasions, and she was very good cook, and yeah, they were very comfortable.
With each other, I think, But by the mid seventies things had changed dramatically. Missus Coventry continued to work as a housekeeper and cue, but she was also caring for her husband, who developed a severe form of dementia. His condition was so serious that Melanie's father installed locks on doors inside their cottage to keep both Clive and his wife safe. There was one on the lounge room side of the hallway, another on the outside of his bedroom.
That's correct. He was suffering from a dementia that on occasions he had what I guess we would call hallucinations or distortions of what was going on. And there were incidents in and around that time that where he was potentially violent and my grandmother may have felt unsafe. So my father did put locks on the doors so that she could remain safe within the house and he was contained within the house.
It's important to note that eighty four year old Clive Coventry was never considered a person of interest in the Easy Street murders, despite his violent episodes. Illness was probably another reason Gladys Coventry was sitting up by the window early that morning. Now the truth story has been reclaimed from the archives, so many aspects of her account of what she saw next door seem significant. Certainly, from what she recalled, there was nothing troubling about the demeanor of either Sue or her male visitor, and there was no sign of Suzanne Armstrong. Could she have been asleep in the front of the house, was there another man with her in her bedroom at the same time, or was someone else lurking outside waiting for Sue's visitor to leave. Clearly, missus Coventry's observations challenge our perceptions about what could have happened that night. As we know, the long held version of events, excepted for four decades, has the murderer coming in the front door opened by Suzanne. Melanie has another take on it too.
It makes me wonder what have we Has the investigation focused on the wrong person? Has it really been about Susan Bartlett rather than says Anne Armstrong? That's what I'm starting to wonder, you know, how many men were really there? Who is this tall man?
And it also raises and brings into sharper focus what Peter Sellers has always maintained. At about two point thirty he heard a front door what he thought was a front door slam, then two car door slam and a car take off towards Smith Street.
Absolutely, the timeframes seem to fit in. You wonder where we ever know?
And I'm also just remembering on one of the occasions we've spoken before about this, that you just wishing you could go back and see her again, go back in time, and asked that question, why didn't you tell me? You know, when I was grown up? Why didn't you say anything?
Yeah, I think that often. Why didn't I ask?
You know?
That's probably too busy at living life, I guess. And you know, I do wonder how much mum Mum discussed it with An and maybe it was very very conscious decision on both their behalfs to you know, just keep it quiet because we don't see anybody hurt.
Now. Police will only confirm that they spoke to her grandmother in February nineteen seventy eight, a year after the murders, and of course that raises another vexed question. If it was the first time they took her statement, did truth Scoop actually force their hand to finally interview her. For Melanie and her family, it certainly confirms their grandmother could have played a significant role in trying to solve the case, had she been taken seriously by investing Gators from the start.
You know, we understand that memory can be distorted, but maybe Nana did no more than she led on and I think she just she was protecting everybody.
As well as Gladys Coventry's interview and accompanying photographs, The Truth also published a photo of the service lane that separated the two houses, with a black arrow added to indicate the window from where she'd seen the man with sup And whenever Hugh Perry Jones is in that old lane, it's never far from his mind. So when you talk to missus Coventry, you were out here, your skip was here, ye, And what do you remember?
Okay, Now that I look at the architecture, I believe her kitchen lean too started here and it was low on that wall. And that's why that window was the window that when she comes from the kitchen carrying her food or whatever. She can sit there at the little table in front of that window, which is as we see straight across for this window, which is not their kitchen, because the kitchen's back here, so that would have been a lounge and there it is, So.
She would have been sitting there, and as she says in the Story and Truth.
In the wee hours two am or whatever on a hot night, her back door would have only been six feet from the table, and she'd be getting the breeze in from the south yep.
And because she's in the dark and they've got the lights on, she.
Can see that, that's right, And otherwise the laneway is completely dark.
And looking at this lane now, I mean in those days we're talking nearly fifty years ago, those gates weren't there. She was still at risk giving that interview that for truth, because as you look at this lane way, how easy it would have been for that guy to come back get over her little rickety fence.
They're so close that, of course you know, the windows probably open too. She's probably because she's getting a breeze through and he could reach through and grab her before she could move doesn't bear thinking.
About next time on the Easy Street murders.
Those first initial thirty six forty eight hours are so important, but you've got to put yourself back in the time where it was. The tools that you had were a good old fashioned shoe leather, knock on doors, ask questions, assume nothing, believe no one, and check check checked,
