Original subtitles

I can't imagine the horror of waking up to a stranger,

standing over the bed.

Growing up in the 50s, 60s,

in those days, I never thought of murder.

There was never a concern for safety.

- Perth was the most isolated city, some say, in the world.

- It was a million miles from everywhere.

It still is.

- There was a well-developed sense of community.

People didn't worry much about children playing outside,

or how late they were for tea.

There was a sense of self-assurance.

- Nobody locked their doors.

- We didn't think of shutting windows or anything.

- In the 60s, I was a detective and it was very boring.

- But something incredibly evil started happening in our community.

- There were seven girls hit by some maniac driver.

- I saw the lights.

I thought, "Oh my God, he's going to hit me."

This is where I found her bleeding to death.

- And there was a strangler.

I woke up. This figure appeared.

I just started screaming.

(SCREAMS)

- Then there were shooting murders.

- On a Saturday evening,

five people have been shot in the Perth metropolitan area,

(GUNSHOT)

without any apparent motive.

- Eight murders and fourteen attempted murders.

- The town was abuzz with a serial killer on the loose.

- The police were getting desperate to catch him.

And the police believed it was Alan Ellis.

- Daryl Beamish

- and John Button.

- The police turned around and said,

'Why did you do it?'

I was trying not to panic,

but they weren't believing what I was saying.

Bloody stupid lies.

Now that bloke Button is bloody guilty.

- I believe there was a big cover up

and three young men were sitting in prison.

Innocently.

- Guilty of manslaughter,

guilty of murder.

He wasn't guilty of any counts.

This was terrorising Perth.

- Perth changed completely.

- It was never the same again.

- It was like a stone in a pond.

The ripples affected all these people

for a very long time.

- There's been some very, very hurtful things done.

- I'm finding it harder to go on.

- You either carry on or you go down.

Well I chose to go up.

- My Dad emotionally was absent.

I held resentment.

I don't think you will ever find your freedom.

- But I didn't do it.

I don't believe it.

Button's guilty as hell.

So you run, run, run

From everything you are

And you're lost

With every scar

And you say my name like it's a game

But you can't hide

I see you there

Behind the lies

You never know the pain

It comes and goes

In ways that cannot be erased

It only fades away

Long enough to remember

The price we paid

- Patricia Vinico Berkman.

They called her Pnina, and also Penny.

She was my Mum.

I remember only crying once by myself when I was eight,

and I realised that my mother was gone.

And I sat by myself somewhere

and I cried, and I cried, and I cried, and I cried.

That's the only thing I remember.

- Pnina Berkman.

She was a part-time model.

She worked in a city store, in the cosmetics department.

Well that night she'd been to dinner with her boyfriend.

Top radio announcer.

A young man called Photis Huntis.

The couple had then returned to her flat,

and they'd gone to bed together.

He then left.

That was the last time he ever saw her, I guess.

The murder was discovered by Photis.

He was driving to work, and he saw a window was open

and the front door was open.

So he stopped and checked it out and to his horror,

he found his dying girlfriend gasping near the door.

She was actually still alive when Photis found her,

but she died very soon afterwards.

The intruder stabbed her once through the face

and once through the chest.

And she had fought her attacker really to the death.

She had put up a very, very good fight,

but no one can survive an eight-inch blade

going into their heart.

Even after the intruder had left, she managed to crawl to the door.

She just couldn't go any further.

The night of the tragedy, I wasn't there.

I was sleeping with another family.

The Millikan family.

- That hedge wasn't there. - No.

It was all just wide open.

- Tell me how you felt when you learnt the news.

Oh, God.

Just couldn't, well, couldn't believe it at first,

because, I mean, it didn't happen to people you knew, you know?

Horrific.

She and her husband were divorced.

And she came over here from the eastern states.

I think she wanted to start a new life over here.

She was very vivacious.

She was very, very friendly.

Very beautiful.

- Just like a movie star. - Yeah.

- She was, actually, wasn't she? - Yeah.

So she was like a big sister to me, and we just loved her, you know.

But what was really sad

Penny's son, Mark,

my mother was babysitting Mark at our place.

- Yeah, I was interviewed by the police and...

..I'm recalling they showed me a few knives.

And asked me...

..if I can see a knife that belonged to us,

and I said no.

- And then Mum wanted him to stay with us, but the police,

they organised for his father to come across to get him.

The only thing, I asked my father, "What happened to Mum?"

and he said, "A madman did something to Mum."

He didn't even say the word.

I don't remember anything about Mother.

I've got a total blackout.

Yeah, I want to see ...

I want to see her face in my mind, and I can't.

All of a sudden, you lose a mother.

One day you see her, the next day you don't.

And then something happens in your mind.

- Well at that point,

Pnina Berkman's killer had not been found

but the police, they thought they knew who it was.

Her boyfriend, Photis Huntis.

And he was another foreigner.

He'd come from Greece.

He wasn't one of us.

But he was with her the night before.

The neighbours in fact confirmed he was there the night before

and he went back to Greece.

He'd really cast suspicion on himself by leaving the country,

and in those days, you left the country, you were out of reach.

So the police let it be known that they knew who'd done it.

They just didn't have the evidence to catch him.

- Remember this one? This was actually --

I do.

Oh yes.

- Could you read that headline

and tell me what you remember about that one?

Nude Divorcee...

- Thirty-three...

- Slain in Flat.

Yeah. Pretty tragic.

We weren't used to that sort of thing.

No. Things like that didn't happen in Perth.

The way she was murdered was terrible.

I think you think what they've gone through that's ...

Yes.

The terrible fear that they must have had.

Oh, absolutely.

- Pnina Berkman, it was alarm-raising.

But it didn't change our ways, because she wasn't one of us.

- And people who lived in the Western Suburbs of Perth

didn't relate to her.

She was looked on as immoral.

- She was a divorcee,

doing what you weren't allowed to do in those days.

She'd been discovered, goodness me, having sex before marriage.

That to us was always quite a dreadful thing to do.

- Big no-no. - Absolutely. (LAUGHS)

- Things have changed. - Yes.

And she lived in South Perth, which was a long way in those days

from the very comfortable Western Suburbs.

It was the other side of the river, which was good.

Not Western Suburbs side.

- I've heard people talk about Perth,

then there's the Western Suburbs.

What are the Western Suburbs?

- Cottesloe, Swanbourne, Peppermint Grove,

Dalkeith, Nedlands, Claremont.

The golden triangle, if you like.

- What do they mean when people distinguish the Western Suburbs?

Um, I think they often mean that...

..perhaps they're more the upper-class suburbs.

I'm not really sure.

Although we regard people from the south of Perth

as just living in the south of Perth for no other reason.

- We've got the ocean, and the river very close to where we live.

- The parents of the kids were largely professionals.

Teachers, engineers, managers, accountants, architects.

There was a different class separation.

We were a bit insular, here in the Western Suburbs.

And the river acted as quite a large barrier

and we treated people who lived on the other side of the river

as in a different country, almost.

So the rest of Perth suburbs

they seemed to think that we were a bit...

we thought we were better than them.

- I mean, actually people said, "Which side did she live?"

- Yeah.

- And if you were that side, well, it wasn't so good.

Yes.

- It was a bit snobby. - It was very snobby.

- Yes, yes. - Perth was snobby. Yes.

- It was, yes. Very.

- Would you describe it as a safer place?

- The Western Suburbs, absolutely a safe place.

Safer than any part of Perth, no question about it.

- Nine months later,

another young woman murdered in her bed.

The victim in this case was Jillian Brewer,

twenty-two-year-old heiress.

- Oh, my god.

Jillian Brewer?

This was a real shock.

That really hit home because she lived in the Western Suburbs.

She was one of us.

I love it!

(QUIETLY) I love this. Oh, Yes.

- Poor Jillian Brewer had been hit with the back of a tomahawk.

And she had also been stabbed through the breast with scissors.

And she'd been hit over the head and on the body

and between her legs with this axe.

(SCREAMS)

Her dog, a French poodle called Christian Dior,

was cowering under the bed.

And she'd remained alive for quite a long time,

probably for two or three hours after she was attacked.

It was a most horrific murder.

In fact, the Coroner said it was the worst murder

he had ever had to deal with.

I've seen the photographs of the crime scene and really,

it's something I've never been able to get out of my mind.

It's stark and horrible and heart-breaking.

- The murder was so close to home.

You know, it was Cottesloe.

It was the talk, you know, of the town.

- It was eerie. It was horrible.

And I vaguely knew her boyfriend.

- It was a shock to read about this and not have any of the answers.

- No one knew who'd committed the murder.

It was a mystery.

There were no suspects in any sort of domestic or family sense.

It was a real whodunnit.

I think I would have just thought,

"Well the police are looking into that. That's good."

There was absolutely the expectation

that the police would get their man.

They were always right, and you wouldn't fault them.

- We all believed everything that the police stated.

We felt we were in very, very good safe hands.

- But something very strange was going on here.

Jillian Brewer and Pnina Berkman.

It seems these two events must have been connected.

The pathologist who examined both bodies and said, "There is...

"There are similarities here, you know.

"I wonder if we're dealing with the same perpetrator."

Both had been stabbed

and they were young women, asleep in their beds,

in ground floor flats.

But the police did not think they were connected,

because they thought

that Photis Huntis had killed his girlfriend,

and that he'd left the country.

He'd fled.

So how could the two crimes be connected?

The pathologist was asking the public

to choose between his theory and the police theory.

If the police said something to me, you would simply obey it.

You wouldn't question it for one minute,

because it would be fact.

That's it.

- In the 60s,

there'd be about 65 or 70 active detectives.

And you were doing breaking and enters

and stealing and rapes.

But very, very often you went on duty,

and every time you got a call, many of them,

the job you got, that 'we heard someone in the backyard.'

And it was very boring.

But Brewer, well it was very difficult.

Now the lead detective in this case was Detective Sergeant Owen Leitch,

who had a huge reputation.

He was a god among detectives.

People who read crime fiction and watched movies,

Owen Leitch embodied this mythical crime solver.

The police, they photographed the scene.

They found the tomahawk that had been used.

Took statements.

Their enquiries went nowhere.

They did not get a sniff of a clue.

The case was not progressing at all well.

The wealth of Perth resided in those suburbs.

They were people of influence in Perth.

The sort of people who didn't take no for an answer.

When the police said they can't find anybody,

"Well you find someone. That's your job.

"We pay you do to do your job."

The police felt there was a sexual element to the Brewer murder

because of the attack on the lower part of her body.

Owen Leitch began looking at sex offenders.

And a young man who lived within walking distance

of where Jillian Brewer lived was picked up.

Daryl Raymond Beamish.

Daryl Beamish, he was an unusual person.

Daryl used to lurk.

A kid who wasn't quite the same as the rest of us.

My impression of Daryl Beamish was that he was an outsider.

He was a little bit of an outcast, if you like.

I understood that he amused himself

by peeping, probably, into houses and so on.

- He'd looked but not touched.

But that was a serious offence.

Leitch immediately suspected he may have been involved

in the Brewer murder.

- Owen Leitch, he was the best detective in Perth.

He was the smartest one out, I reckon.

He knew that this little bastard killed Jillian Brewer.

Well Leitch got hold of Beamish and the first question he asked him was,

"Have you ever been to Brookwood Flats?"

And Daryl Beamish said, yes, he had.

He'd met a girl who lived there, and he had dropped her home.

And of course,

Leitch's copper's instinct flashed like lightning at this.

So he pointed to Jillian Brewer's flat and said,

"Have you ever been here before?" And he said, "Yes."

Daryl Beamish admitted to the crimes.

Here we've got Daryl Beamish's confession.

Questions and answers.

"Did you kill the lady?"

"Yes."

"How did you get into the flat?"

"I had wire and push key. Drop."

"Did you take your pants off to fuck lady?"

"Yes."

"Did you get blood on yourself?"

"Yes, all around my cock."

"Why did you kill the lady?"

"My head mix up."

- And he said, "What about the axe? What about the tomahawk?"

"I threw over fence."

"Do you understand?"

"Yes, I want to tell truth."

- Daryl Beamish,

he was just a ...

a hateful little bastard, that's all he was, you know.

Owen Leitch, he was a very solid detective.

And Owen put Beamish inside.

And guilty.

- A detective told the Perth Police Court today

that youth Daryl Beamish allegedly made a verbal

and a written confession to the murder of Jillian Brewer.

(MUSIC)

- Everyone was quite happy.

You know, people were relieved.

Just glad it was over and done with.

- Relieved.

"Oh, they've got him. Thank god."

Police had done a good job.

Somebody had been accountable.

- It was a good thing someone had confessed to it,

but at the same time, there was something not right about it.

I do remember Dad and I talking about it

and it just seemed odd.

Daryl wouldn't hurt a fly.

You know, I used to go roller-skating,

speed skating with him.

And if you knocked over a woman,

he'd say, "Hey, take it easy. Slow down," you know?

When they told me he'd done Jillian Brewer,

I just couldn't see it.

Detective Sergeant Leitch said that Beamish confessed,

and Detective Sergeant Leitch was a very important person and he knew.

If he said that happened, it happened.

And the fact that he admitted to it,

I thought, well, he's admitted to it.

- Owen, he was promoted a number of times on the strength

of the great work he'd done in locking up Daryl Beamish.

Well Mum was extremely proud

when Owen Leitch became Commissioner of Police,

because they went to school together in Collie, for a time.

Mum thought Owen Leitch was the best cop in the world,

and she would speak highly of him very often.

Generally speaking, I think the community feeling was that

a crime had been solved.

- The people were assured that the first one was in Greece

and the second one,

the killer of poor Jillian Brewer, Daryl Beamish,

he was safely tucked away in Fremantle Prison.

So we were assured there was no danger.

And we felt very happy

and they kind of got forgotten about.

My name is John Button.

I was born in England, UK,

and came out to Australia in 1958,

when I was 14.

Back in 1963, I was 18, going on 19.

This spate of crime, it suddenly happened

but I wasn't concerned.

I was just too much in love to worry about it,

with my girlfriend, Rosemary Anderson.

But in 1963, Rosemary, what she had to go through,

yeah, I never got over-

I suppose I still haven't got over it properly.

So um ...

I got married in '68 to my wife, Helen.

It's been very hard for my wife.

She realises that Rosemary's still part of my life.

She's had to be stuck in a marriage where there's three of us.

- You know, there's times he'll talk of her and...

..yeah, and it's hard to swallow...

..at times.

So you just have to go on. Keep going forward.

- She's had to look after me and be my carer

all these years.

My girlfriend's husband would go down and check to see

if he wasn't hanging in their garage,

'cause I quite often thought

that when the kids were at school, John would go and hang himself.

This event has stayed with me

for the last 50, 60 years.

Back in the 50s and 60s,

I loved ballroom dancing,

and I was able to get an apprenticeship

being a bricklayer.

And then I got my car and driver's licence.

It was all that I could ask for, really.

I had a future to look forward to.

And this one night, I met Frank Kellett.

I was in the Swanbourne Theatre.

I rode me motorbike up the stairs and around the foyer

and down the stairs to pick up this bird.

I met John.

John had a Simca.

It was a nice little motor car.

Anyway, we got talking.

We clicked.

You couldn't help but like him, and we just became mates.

Things we got up to was terrific.

Football.

Surf clubs.

We used to go kangaroo shooting.

John could shoot the eye out of a crow at a thousand yards,

he was that accurate with a rifle.

(LAUGHS)

- One day, Frank, he wanted to line a date up for me, a blind date.

So I parked outside his girlfriend's house

and she came out with...

..Rosemary.

- He liked Rosemary a lot,

a bloody lot.

Oh dear.

- She was a beautiful looking girl.

I, I just couldn't think of anything to say.

opened the door for her,

trying to be a bit of a gentleman.

And still, I couldn't think of anything to say.

- I said to John,

"Everything alright, John?"

He said, "Yeah! Yeah!" you know, sort of thing.

And after we'd been there five minutes,

Frank called over from the backseat,

"You gonna sit there like a stale bottle of beer,

or are you gonna, you know, get to know her, or whatever?"

Yeah.

Yes, everything you could wish for.

They started a relationship.

So I'd be down there every night, straight after work.

I'd take her out on weekends.

Her father used to refer to me as his future son-in-law.

She was going on 17,

we decided that we'd wait 'til her 18th birthday to get engaged.

Everything that I wanted was falling into place.

This was around Christmas time.

And then everything went so wrong.

- Australia Day is when we celebrate

everything Australian.

We celebrate the fact we live here.

It's summer, it's typically very hot.

It was, go to the beach,

barbecues.

- Generally it's a time of relaxation

and joining up with friends and having a quiet party somewhere.

- A swim through, isn't it?

They just drink from morning 'til dusk.

- On the 26th of January 1963,

the Australia Day long weekend,

I'd gone out with Rosemary and her parents to a social.

I was in a

patrol car,

in charge of afternoon shift.

We just patrolled up through Kings Park.

Nobody came and nobody went,

so I finished my shift and went home.

- It was a very hot night.

And in Cottesloe,

there was a courting couple.

- Would you like a drink? - What have you got?

- Oh, it's a beer.

- Beer? - Yeah.

- Oh, I could go some beer.

You look like you're struggling a bit there.

- Do you need a hand? - It's alright. I'll get it off.

- Don't worry. - Are you sure?

- Yeah, it's all good.

- It's actually not ... - How about you just let me ...

In the car was Nick August.

He was a well-known businessman, and Rowena Reeves,

a barmaid that worked down at the OBH.

The Ocean Beach Hotel is a famous Cottesloe hotel.

Come on.

She saw something.

He- He's got a gun!

He's got a gun!

(SCREAMS)

(GUNSHOT)

- And the bullet just missed the man's head

and caught the hand of the young woman.

Past the local tennis courts

and across the road,

there was a young surf lifesaver asleep in his bed.

- Brian Weir was an accountant, due to be married a few months later

and a surf lifesaver.

He had two alarm clocks on

so that he'd make sure he'd wake up early for training.

Next morning, when he wasn't at practise,

his mate, Lyn Bath, found him.

Amazingly, although he was shot in the head, he didn't die,

and he was still gurgling and bleeding.

They did get him rushed to hospital, but he died a few years later.

The shooter then went to Nedlands.

John Sturkey, he was a top student

at the University of Western Australia.

He and another guy had tossed a coin

to see who would sleep on the back verandah,

because sleeping outside was great in summer.

(GUNSHOT)

And he'd been shot in the head.

Then the next street,

George Walmsley.

He played the organ at the Methodist Church in Nedlands.

(BELL)

He'd answered the doorbell at about 4am.

(GUNSHOT)

- Just shot him through the head.

- He was rushed to hospital and died an hour later,

after arrival at hospital.

- We heard it on the two-way as something going on,

because it was a shooting.

Well the next day, we were called into the muster room.

Oh, it was shocking.

From then on in,

all everybody,

every policeman in Western Australia

had a job to do on the serial killer.

- Perth's great crime wave of 1963 has begun.

Five people have been shot by a mystery sniper

in Nedlands and Cottesloe.

Now a gunman was loose.

Perth has been transformed into a city of fear.

It's just hard to imagine.

I can remember it so clearly, as if it was yesterday.

I was at home with my parents. I was a schoolkid.

People spoke of nothing else,

and the terror that gripped the city, you can't imagine it.

- Gunman still at large.

- Kills two.

- Injures three.

- Shock horror. - Shock horror.

Yeah. So many murders in such a short time.

They were just amazed

how it could happen in the Western Suburbs.

Five people in one night.

Most disturbing.

It was all so close to home.

And it struck fear into everybody.

- And it was random.

There was nothing about it that tied any of these people together.

- Perth changed that day and so did we.

- People got weapons.

They slept with firearms under their bed.

We all started closing and locking our windows

and locking our doors.

- My husband put this lock here.

Nobody could get in.

- We had bars put on our windows.

On a hot night, we used to sleep out on the lawn.

We stopped doing that straight away.

- The police had the lights turned on at night,

all the street lights.

And so at night time, with the lights now on,

the trees moving in the wind,

you'd lie in bed looking at the shadows,

terrified that one of those shadows would become a person.

- People put dunnies inside. We did.

Very scary to go out there of a night time.

- The kids used to sleep on the back verandah.

"Those kids aren't safe there.

"Bring them inside and lock em in with you.'

They used to sleep on the floor, next to me bed.

Me husband, he'd say, "Lock the doors.

"You know my knock."

He had a certain knock, and whistle.

"When you hear them, you open the door, not before."

I'd open the door

and pull him in and say,

"I hate this killer on the loose.

"When are they gonna catch him?"

- At the time,

we thought the police were on top of the matter,

that they were going to find out who the killer was.

And they'd already picked up Beamish.

The police knew what they were doing.

- This was a very traumatic time,

so he virtually held the city at ransom.

We had no idea at all

whether it was one particular person or another.

It was very disturbing for everybody.

- It was very, very difficult to get some information.

You'd knock on the door and it wouldn't get opened.

We had a knock on the door at 8pm one night

and we were all ushered to the bedrooms

while Mum called out from a long distance from the door,

"Who is it?"

- The people were really worried about the situation.

The only clue they had found from the Australia Day shootings

was one cartridge found on the driveway

behind where the university student was shot.

And that gave them their only clue.

Forensic evidence was in its infancy.

They took footprints.

There was fingerprinting.

And they could check tyre marks.

Fairly basic forensics.

And of course firearms.

You had bullet casings and bullets.

That was quite well advanced,

the science of identifying matching bullets

to rifles and handguns.

- We had crews who were making checks on firearms

throughout the country areas of the state,

.22 calibre, similar to the ones used in the shooting.

That involved the checking of some 60-odd thousand firearms,

not only in Western Australia,

but they were checking firearms in the eastern states as well.

- But they came up with absolutely zero.

Nothing.

It was a true murder mystery.

You were doing the job and getting nowhere.

Very hard.

- What's that say?

- "Deadlock In Killer Hunt." Yep.

- Do you remember that? - Yeah.

- What'd they-

Oh, I don't remember reading it in the-

- No, but do you remember what it was like?

That's what it was like, yeah.

Oh yeah.

People, they were very upset

that we weren't doing any good.

- That you couldn't catch him? - No.

- Public opinion of the police wasn't too good.

"Why can't they get him?"

They needed someone.

The police were trying to find out what connection they had.

There seemed to be something about the Ocean Beach Hotel.

Rowena.

He's got a gun!

(GUNSHOT)

She was a barmaid there, if I remember rightly.

They tried to work out

how the killer got from one murder location to the next.

A journalist got on a bicycle and cycled to see

if perhaps they'd cycled between.

He just does not conform.

He's one who does not conform to any of the accepted murderer patterns.

- The victims, girls, boys, men, older people,

didn't seem to matter much.

They were speculating that this person was crazed,

but one of the frightening things about it was that he was methodical.

Accurate.

He'd left no clues.

He was an intelligent predator,

and that made him even more dangerous.

The police were under intense pressure

from the Western Suburbs community.

A little desperate.

Yes.

The community weren't very happy with the police.

If you don't feel safe, then you're not happy.

Yeah, yeah, it was terrifying.

And people said, "Who's next? It could be me."

Anyone of us could be asleep in our beds

and someone could come and shoot us.

I certainly thought I could be next.

We had an outdoor toilet,

but behind that was just pure black,

and I could just imagine this killer,

sitting up in the tree,

waiting for me to walk to the toilet.

So here I was, about to become a mature adult, a grown up,

no way was I going to go outside and walk along

with this big black abyss of a backyard behind it

that he could shoot me from.

So I had a potty all that hot summer.

And then two weeks later,

we woke up to hear that there was another major, major crime.

A girl was run down,

not far from where we lived, in Shenton Park.

She'd been hit by a car at about 30 kilometres an hour,

about 20 miles an hour.

She'd been projected up onto the front of the car,

carried by the car for a very long distance.

- February 9 being my 19th birthday,

I was up early, showered, dressed

and went down to Rosemary's house to spend the day with her.

We bought fish and chips and we sat down

and we played cards together for the next hour.

- You win? - Yeah, I win.

(LAUGHS)

- It was a fortnight after the shootings.

We should have been more aware of it but...

..Rosemary and I, we were too much in love to worry about it.

So?

It was something shocking that it happened,

but we weren't going to let it interfere with our life.

So we carried on as usual.

- You win. - Did I win?

Yeah, you win.

But we had an argument.

No, I don't want to.

I don't want to do it.

Rosemary proceeded to walk home.

So I followed her in my car.

I parked my car just a little bit down from here.

She crossed over the intersection here,

under the subway and turned left up Stubbs Terrace.

And I watched my girlfriend walk out of sight.

I lit up a cigarette

and sat there for two or three minutes, smoking it,

waiting to give Rosemary

a little bit of extra time to cool off.

I was concerned on the fact that it's a very dark road

and she'd be walking up there in the dark.

So I drove up Stubbs Terrace, towards the top of the hill.

I got up to a point, about here,

and saw her lying in the sand on the edge of the road.

I didn't know what to think.

I was hoping, hope upon hope,

that she was just throwing herself down on the sand,

crying her eyes out.

So as quickly as I could,

I slid across the seat, opened up the passenger door

and ran over to where she was laying in the sand.

She was laying about here,

unconscious, with a large gash above her right eye.

And there was a pool of blood under her head,

and she was bleeding into the sand.

And I slipped my arms underneath her and lifted her up

and carried her back to the car.

I was trying not to panic.

I never thought of anything other

than getting her to a doctor's surgery.

And I drove off as fast as I could, down to the family doctor.

She was seriously injured.

He called for an ambulance and he also called the police.

These police officers asked me what had happened.

- John?

- And I started off

about telling them that we'd had an argument.

So they took a statement.

They sent their vehicle examiner down to look at my car.

Trevor Condren.

- I was just asked to examine the vehicle

for its mechanical condition.

And that is what I did.

I then checked the brakes and the lights

and everything like that.

I could see nothing really outstandingly wrong with it.

But then...

I then could see damage.

It looked like a collision.

- The headlight was broken,

and there was quite severe damage to the grille of the car.

And there was blood on the car.

Suddenly their attitude just got colder and colder.

- Here they had a shockingly injured young woman.

They had her nervously stuttering boyfriend,

standing beside his car, which had damage to the front of it.

Police wouldn't buy it.

- They turned around and said, "We know it's you."

"Just tell us why."

- Remand for youth.

A 19-year-old labourer ...

Was yesterday remanded ...

- In custody on a charge of having knocked down and injured ...

a 17-year-old girl at Shenton Park on or about Saturday.

- I thought, "How can anybody do that?"

How could somebody do that?

- John Button,

I heard he had a temper.

That's a lot of bullshit.

He did not touch Rosemary.

- On first reading, you'd say,

"Maybe we've got our murderer.

"Maybe we've got the breakthrough we need."

I was beside myself.

(MUSIC)

He said, "There's been a killing."

- Another shooting? Perth erupts again.

- Pen in her hand, and a bullet hole in the head.

- The nature of the murders were so brazen.

- We were dealing with a maniac.

- He's still out there looking for unlocked doors.

I heard he had a temper.

Hope they catch the bugger that did it.

It was obvious that I was the culprit.

It was a downright bloody lie.