September 28, 2025 • 44 mins
In this gripping episode, Adam is joined by forensic archaeologist Dr. Louise Steding to revisit the unsolved 1953 murder of 14-year-old Shirley Collins. Shirley disappeared on her way to a birthday party in Melbourne, only to be found brutally murdered days later at Mount Martha. Despite intensive police work, the case went cold—until Louise’s meticulous research uncovered overlooked evidence and a compelling new suspect. Together, Adam and Louise retrace the crime, challenge unreliable witness accounts and explore how modern forensic science might finally solve this haunting mystery.
Read Dr Lousie Steding's Book "Inconceivable Malice: Profiling the Killer of Shirley Cooper" here:
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Approache Production.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shann. I'm your host,
Adam Shann. I've got a new collecting obsession old crime
headlines from Melbourne's Truth newspaper What's your goodbyfe for six
months back in the fifties costs about ten bucks a
day and second hand stores another day, came upon one
from October nineteen fifty four, but just jumped out of
(00:40):
me in screaming ninety six point type. Here's what it read,
How are you feeling? Killer? Did you like what you
read about your victim Shirley Collins at the Inquest this week?
How you took a fourteen year old girl for a
ride in a car to a deserted home in Mount Martha,
And when you got there, how you suddenly attacked her,
(01:03):
ripped off her clothing, savagely smashed her head in with
a bottle and pieces of concrete guttering. Did a great
shudder run through your body as she thought back to
the girl's agonized cries of the blood that must have
gushed onto your hands, your clothing. To shocking story. The victim,
(01:27):
Shirley Collins, was on her first adult night out on
September twelve, nineteen fifty three a birthday party. She was
last seen at North Richmond Railway station in inner city Melbourne.
Three days later, her battered corpse was found in a
driveway at Mount Martha, some eighty kilometers away. Police promised
(01:49):
a swift arrest for this heenous crime, Truth offered one
thousand pounds for information. I thought to myself, this crime
must have been solved long ago. I looked it up
and to my surprise, it still hasn't. So I thought,
how can I add a fresh angle to this? As
I'm pouring over Google, I see that a friend and colleague,
(02:13):
doctor Louise Steading, has done the work for me. Louise
is what I call an industrial strength forensic archaeologist. She's
taught forensic psychology, criminology, and policing to cops in two states,
among many thousands of other students. In a field where
once over lightly for the media is enough for many,
(02:34):
Louise digs deep and hard with passion and focus. She
and her partner Gerald now work on cold cases, going
back to the basics of the evidence and doing some
amazing work. Louise has spent years on Shirley's case and
has come up with what I believe is a very
credible suspect that everyone missed. And it's my pleasure to
(02:58):
welcome Louise to the Real Crime Studio today.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Luise, Hello, Adam. We're back again to working together, so
that's great.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The last time I was with you were up at
Sensible Creek near Charda's Towers looking for the remains of
Anita Cunningham, and you're still in that case, so I
really commend you for that.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, we're heading back up there. Hence we're on the road,
so excuse any passing cars or birds.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
The caravans on the road looking for looking for clues.
It's fantastic. What a life I envy. You tell me
who was Shirley Collins.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Shirley Collins was a fourteen year old girl who was
heading off on her very first adult party. I mean,
it's very sad she never made it, tots. She was
also apparently do you know there are friends of hers
who was still alive. They meet each year. They're in
(03:53):
their eighties and they talk about Shirley. They described her
as a good girl. She was a quiet, industry good
girl who wouldn't get in the car of a stranger,
who had been well raised by foster parents, however, deserted
(04:16):
by her mother. I say mother because I think her
father was probably killed in the war. Her stepfather deserted
her her mother. The friends had often thought that her
mother didn't care for her, but I think that might
be wrong. Her mother had Her birth mother had a
(04:36):
criminal record and was basically in flight from the police
and headed up to Queensland. But devastating for a fourteen
year old.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
I think it was just minor larceny charges the theft
of a gold watch I believe, which I think Shirley
was possibly wearing.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yes, so, yes, that's what I thought.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
So on the night of September twelfth, nineteen fifty three,
she's heading to a party at Richmond. She's going to
be picked up by a colleague. She's working at GJ.
Cole's Variety store in Burke Street in Melbourne, and this
is her social network. Yeah, she's met people she's working
where she's the one of the younger ones at fourteen.
(05:21):
But she arranges to meet Ronald John Holmes, twenty one,
one of her workmates. He thinks they're meeting at Richmond Station.
She doesn't know about Richmond Station and so she goes
to North Richmond station.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
What happened next, Well, Ronald Holmes, he was her chaperone.
A lot of people thought, oh ah, this guy, because
of the seven year age difference, had something to do
with it. Maybe maybe not. At this stage, when Shirley
got off at the station, he wasn't anywhere. Ronald wasn't
(05:59):
anywhere to be seen. He probably went to a different station,
so she would have felt very stood up and humiliated.
He did too elsewhere. He added straight to the party
and actually told people he'd been stood up. But Shirley
wasn't seen again. Actually she wasn't seen since the bus stop.
(06:24):
She wasn't really seen until there's a change over between
bus and train. That's where she wasn't seen since.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Because she's coming in from reservoir reservoir as we call
it down here, and she gets the train into North Richmond.
And as you say, she was not the kind of
girl to jump in a stranger's car. I think she
would have been more likely to have simply turned around
and gone home. But then there's a critical alleged sighting
(06:57):
at about eight o'clock. A woman is walking down from
Punt Road down Elizabeth Street, towards North Richmond station and
she sees a girl fitting Shirley Collins description, and she's
talking to a man in a car.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Can I just interject there? Sure there's more than one
witness There were two. And these witnesses came forward two
months after Shirley's body was found. And this is a
huge discrepancy. This is a huge lapse of time that
impacts the reliability of memory. Also, we know that since
(07:36):
this time, many publications in the newspapers have been presented.
For example, one of the witnesses reported that she was
wearing a pearl necklace because that's how she was presented
in the actual newspaper. But in fact they found the
pearl necklace back at home. She hadn't worn it at all.
(08:00):
So when I looked at this book, I looked for
inconsistent seas and consistencies, and quite frankly, I pushed many
of the witnesses aside and try to trace steps. A
lot of this has to do with timing and movement.
(08:23):
That's how I look to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Fascinating in your book, Inconceivable Malice, you do cast doubt
on these eyewitness accounts. You've always got to be careful
with thy witness accounts because they can be influenced by
what people have read. Memory fades away very quickly, as
you say, this was some weeks or months after the events.
So we really can't be sure that she even got
(08:48):
to North Richmond station, Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, But irrespective that even if she didn't get to
North Richmond station at some time, say Regent Street station
where the bus at the bus and the train intersection,
at some stage she got in a car and so
basically I take that and that car went to Mount Martha.
(09:14):
And this is why the timing I've looked at motor
vehicle speeds, traffic lights, headlights, lighting, weather, all that sort
of thing was raining and to narrow down time frames,
you look at I know it sounds gross, but maggots,
maggots that were found. You look at the last meal
(09:38):
that she had, the things that we know. Because I
must say, many of the witness accounts and people can
really want to help the police, but they can be
a huge distraction, a huge distraction if they're incorrect.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
You're right, everything is up for contests in this story.
Only thing we do know for certain is that nine
am Tuesday, three days almost three days after she disappears,
a retired businessman is walking his fox terrier Bombo along
Marine drive Mount Martha. Bombo runs up a driveway to
a vacant cottage, barking and comes back and tugs at
(10:19):
his master's leg, urging him to come see what he's found.
What does the witness find?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Ah, this is crucial now, remembering that two days and
three nights have passed since she actually disappeared. She was
found with her head covered and her head smashed in,
her face smashed in. She was found naked from the
(10:46):
shoulders down except stocking down on one foot. Very staged,
a very staged position for a fourteen year old girl
absolutely dead. I know this sounds awful too, but dec imposing.
It's just imagine how that man felt in finding her. Anyway,
(11:14):
he called the police. Tromana police jumped to it very
quickly and they worked together with the police from Melbourne.
So it was really a good collaboration of many police
at the time of death.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Became a critical element to this whole investigation because, as
you say, police put out calls for information, there was
a radio broadcast, there was pictures of Shirley in the
clothes that she wore, staged up with for the model
and so forth. And this brought a lot of information,
including some witness accounts from people in the Mount Martha
(11:51):
area that suggested that she might not have died on
the Saturday, but some days afterwards, which was very misleading.
It was indeed she was supposed to have been seen
in a hotel.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
In a shop as well, coffee shop, hotel. Well, the
thing is, you think, why on earth would someone do that,
Why on earth would they distract police? Well, it might
be that she's on their mind and they truly believe
that they've seen her and they don't want to not
give information into the police. But I don't actually think
(12:25):
that's what happened here. I think it was good publicity.
Quite frankly, I know that's callous, but I think that
the hotel owner or the shop owner that it brought
the client tell because it did to their premises and
increase their sales. It got them on the map, and
(12:48):
in this instance, it distracted police. It gave them theories
that didn't work, And it wasn't until the medical examiner
came up with his findings that they could refute all
of these unreliable sightings.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And you can imagine how that was for Shirley's foster parents.
She is a quiet, conscientious girl. She's not experienced socially,
and suddenly she's turning up in hotels and drinking beer
and having meals with older men and so forth. So distressing.
But as you pointed out earlier, they.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Stood by her and said, no, no, she would not
have done that. That is not our girl. I thought
that was admirable.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Correct. The medical examiner was critical on this because, as
you said, he looked at the contents of her stomach
and as you indelicately put it, the growth of maggots
on the body over those days, and you suddenly come
back to a very specific time of death. How has
that arrived at Louis.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
It's all from the first lane of eggs. He looked
at the laying of eggs and the timelines of the
different stages of development of maggots found in Shirley's body,
and a different method. Now this is important. These police
tried a different method from a different source of information.
(14:21):
That is a really good way of examining a case.
So the medical examiner also looked at her last meal,
and there was also a false report there too, but
it had certain elements in it that took quite a
long time to digest, Like it was pea and hand
(14:41):
soup and split peas take quite a long time to digest,
but not that long, and so the time was narrowed
in to around seven point thirty pm, so he arrived
at a time frame of between seven thirty pm and
(15:02):
eleven pm. When I mentioned Ronald Holmes earlier, her chaperone.
No matter how I looked at this, he did not
fit within the timeline. This person, the killer, had to
drive to Mount Martha and come back. Remember that Ronald
(15:26):
turned up at the party. The police even asked what
were you all doing at the time he arrived, what
were you watching? They were all watching motorbikes on probably
the TV, so they closed in. That's one person who
got eliminated. Now must say he was also a suspect,
(15:49):
quite a main one for me in the beginning. So
at that point when he did not fit, he got eliminated.
Set to the side, eliminated by me as a suspect,
as he I think was eliminated by the police too. Basically,
(16:10):
I pulled everybody in including the parents, including all the colleagues.
I pulled everybody in as a suspect, especially given that
eighty seven percent of murders are committed by people who
know the victim. Eighty seven percent they don't say to
(16:32):
what extent they know them. But here we've got a
whole bundle of work colleagues, we've got parents, foster parents,
and so on. So everybody became a focus, but not Ronald.
He got eliminated early on.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Well, you know, when I was reading the news clip
that I bought at the bazaar, I thought Ronald Holmes
was the obvious suspect. But when you look at the
drive that he had to make to pick her up
from the station, drive all the way to Mount Martha
Kill her drive back, but he's at the party by
nine point fifteen, so it's just not possible. Now, the
(17:12):
police did a pretty good job in this investigation. True
crime podcasters love dumping on the police, saying that, you know,
in these unsolved cold cases that the police missed this,
and they didn't do that, and they should have done this,
and the rest of it. But in this investigation, Victoria
police I think did a very good job, including the
Inspector Donnelly, who was in charge of the case. He
(17:33):
looked at this for years and years, and I think
he gave you a pretty good baseline of data to
look at. And I think one of the key things
was the meticulous crime scene photographs and descriptions which you've used.
And I'd like you if you could just to tell
us a bit more about that scene, because it was
(17:55):
striking for its barbarity and savagery. Tell us what did
they find and how had she been killed?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
One of the ways and one of the ways I
look at these scenes. So now I look at the landscape,
I look at all the physical remains, be that her
or bottles or concrete covered in blood. It was a
diabolical scene, or clothes strewn across the site itself, with
(18:26):
one shoe even up in a tree. So with this,
to me, every murder sight actually informs about the killer.
It's not just that they do or don't leave physical evidence.
They leave the psychological traces at this site as well. Now,
(18:47):
with this particular scene, Shirley was obsessively bashed. It was
really overkilled. This was obscene, and also that she was
naked and staged. Her legs were apart. It was horrible,
(19:08):
and she was actually found facing upwards, but the police
turned her over, so we've got an image of facing
up with the skirt that covers her head, that covers
her identity. So I actually, in my view, this guy
couldn't face her. But he was so angry that beer
(19:31):
bottles full not yet consumed, were not enough. He pulled
up concrete and smashed in caved in her face. I
was just going to say to you, there's something else
that struck me in one of the photographs. I know
I might have been seeing things, but I was sure
(19:53):
I could see a footprint or a shoe print on
her buttocks, and that was nothing that had ever been
commented on. So that just shows up in a I'm
seeing photo.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
As you say, it was so shocking, as quickly run
through what I've read of it from your book. By
the way, it looks like they've arrived there. They've walked
some distance up this driveway towards the cottage. He's carrying
full bottles of beer, possibly three.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
He struck her from behind with the bottle at least
once or probably twice. She's either unconscious or already dead. He
then pulls her skirt over her head, goes to the
nearby drain and picks up not one, but two pieces
(20:46):
of concrete guttering and comes back smashes her in the
head with this guttering and breaks every bone in her head.
It is shocking, and I'm sorry to go, but I
think it's really important because when you looked at this,
you apply a particular filter, which is the difference between
(21:09):
an organized and a disorganized defender. And what traces of
his personality did the killer leave behind. That's a big
part of your reasoning in this.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Well, with this particular with this particular killer, I think
he actually left quite a few psychological hints there, and
in both the material and its organizational rather disarray. This
is fury and throwing things to the side. It's like
(21:41):
he had an uncontrollable rage, hitting her once on the
head from behind. So just note and all the details
to go with that. Let's note Shirley would not have
cried out because she wouldn't have been expecting a hit
from behind when she goes down. To actually be able
(22:02):
to lift those concrete pieces means he had strength, because
I think they were like fourteen pounds. It's a heavy weight.
He had a certain amount of physical strength. The site
was so disorganized that it suggests he didn't prepare. He
(22:24):
didn't have a shovel and bury her. He didn't come
along there with the intent to actually murder her. It
looks more like he was trying to seduce her with
the three bottles of beer. Which it also looks like
because she was facing the head's downhill, it looks like
(22:47):
she was heading back to the car. She wanted to
go back to the car at the point, the very
point he killed her or struck her on the head.
This suggests rejection. She rejected him and his beer in
his advances. She wasn't interested, and that's true to the
(23:07):
statements of the parents. I think parents are often the
first suspects, understandably, but once they're eliminated, they really need
to be listened to because they know her better than anyone.
I've just got something in my mind that I didn't
put in the book. He held those bottles in his hand.
(23:30):
If he's not prepared to kill her as in premeditated,
and it's this explosion of possibly humiliation at this rejection,
then he held the neck of the bottle and hit
her from behind. In those days, those bottles had the
(23:52):
metal caps, and if the police kept any of those
metal caps, I'll bet you there's a trace of skin
if they were stored correctly, his skin, not brs, would
be under the cap they were ridged.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
That's a very good point, and we'll get to that.
I gin guess is really important about and the possible
resolution of the case even now. Yeah, but what I
find fascinating here is most people would say is the
motive sex? Well, there was no evidence that she was
raped or otherwise molested, But as you point out in
your book, just penetration, if we'd use that word, is
(24:31):
not a complete description of a sexual motive. There are
other reasons connected to power and control, but still render
this a sexual motive. As you say, she could well
have rejected his advances and he reacts with rage.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yes, now hey's older, and we know because she got
into the car, most likely with someone she knew, because
that's in keeping with what we know of Shirley. This
is someone who had focused on her for quite a while,
I would say, and in making advances and wanting to
(25:10):
sit there and give alcohol to an underage kid, she
is a kid. Then the rejection for him was phenomenal
and so he flipped. Basically, that's right.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And to come along story short, there's a number of
people who were going to this birthday party down on
Punt Road, Richmond. It was being held by one of
her work mates, Gavin Willoughby. There was a range of
other people from her workplace who were one by one
eliminated by police back in the day, and I think
you agree broadly that they don't really fit. But there
(25:48):
was one person who was never really eliminated, never really
interviewed by the police, and that was her boss at
GJ Coles. She worked in the tinware department at GJ
Coles in Burke Street, and her boss, there was a
guy called Kevin who was He was the brother of
the man having the birthday party. But what else did
(26:09):
you know about Kevin Kevin?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Okay, he supervised Shirley, so he worked closely together with
Shirley in the ten department. Now, with Kevin, there's not
much written about him. But I did think that with
the ferocity of this attack and the lack of control
and explosive nature of the killer's actions, which I might
(26:35):
add this kind of lack of control and humiliation susceptibility
to humiliation makes him fairly an insecure kind of character,
fairly of weak character. To be insulted at a fourteen
year old puts him a little older. Anyway, back to
(26:57):
Kevin Willoughby, I started delving around, digging around, trying to
find more about him, and I figured that someone with
this kind of anger would have actually committed that a
similar or some kind of crime like this in the background,
or tortured animals or live buyers, or have been in
(27:22):
the theft. Because he's displaying a sense of entitlement, so
he felt entitled to Shirley, and when she rejected him,
that's when he exploded. If we work from that hypothesis,
there must be something else in his past.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I think you've gone beyond what was in the evidence,
in the question, in the papers, and so forth. You
actually spoke to a friend of Shirley's, Maureen, who told
you that Shirley wanted to change her job because some
of her workplace was making things awkward for her. She
said he was mad married, and there you have another
(28:07):
raise of the stakes. If it was Kevin Willoughby, then
here's another reason to fear the consequences of what's happened
at Mount Martha.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, absolutely right. So it's not just if this guy's married,
it could ruin his marriage. So there's divorce, there's more
humiliation in that that will become public knowledge. There's the
loss of his job, there's the huge connection to Shirley.
(28:41):
This guy's pedophile. Basically a killer and a pedophile. Extremely
don't true.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
And I think what also makes it difficult now to
determine this is that police didn't interview him, and the
party goers did not say whether he was at the
party and if so, what time he got there. But
you can back it in that he was probably there
at some state because this was his brother's day, Dan's birthday.
So Evan Willoughby unknown to the police, and they should
(29:10):
have realized this that he had a criminal background, and
even the lead detective in the murder, Donnelly, had dealt
with him earlier in a series of petty thefts and
so forth.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
That was a shock. When I searched around, he came
up in another inquest and it was a shock to
me that Danelly was one of two police officers who'd
actually interviewed Kevin Willoughby much earlier. And that's the point
it really was much earlier. He was a ten year
(29:46):
old boy, blonde hair, and later on he suddenly has
darker hair, and it's eighteen years later. Who on Earth's
going to recognize him? Dannelly didn't recognize him, and I
think that's understandable. He also wasn't the senior officer in
(30:07):
that particular investigation, but he did interview him, and it
was a bit of an awful inquest as well, involving Death's.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Not because this is back in nineteen thirty five, when
an eight year old boy is pulled from a creek
in Hawthorne, and this is December nineteen thirty five, and
of course Kevin Willoughby is on the scene then as well.
They're playing together at Gardener Creek in Hawthorne and Bobby Glead,
(30:38):
the victim, ends up dead. Do you think Kevin Willoughby
had anything to do with Bobby's death?
Speaker 1 (30:46):
I certainly think he had a lot to do with
his death. Listen to this. He watched his friend two
years younger than himself drowning in that creek when someone else,
an adult, was on the other side of the creek
mowing grass. He didn't call out for help. He watched
(31:09):
for fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes until his friend little Bobby
didn't come up anymore. But it doesn't stop there. At
that point, after fifteen minutes, he didn't jump into the
creek to pull him out. He went over to his
friend's clothes, took money from his pockets, and then stumped
(31:35):
them into the mud. He then denied knowing to the
very family of Bobby and to the police. He denied
knowing the whereabouts of Bobby, and yet he led them
all on a wild goose chase, so one he quite
enjoyed leading them around and saying, oh, well, you know
(31:59):
he was down here when I last saw him. He
could be there, He could be there. It's disgraceful, and
I must say in the inquest the coroner also had
enormous skepticism of this. It remains an open case.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
And I think it's certainly very odd and very suspicious.
At the same time, I think you make the point
that his behavior at ten years of age suggests a
curiosity for watching other people's suffering. There's something not quite
right with this kid.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Yeah, there's a trait of young people the future psychopaths.
If you like hurting animals or watching this kind of
event with their best friend, and also stealing. He stole
money because he felt entitled to it. He also lied
(33:00):
to possibly protect himself, though he did get sprung, and
he felt amused perhaps at leading people on a wild
goose chase, watching their pain and suffering. The family he
led them down to the creek and didn't show them
(33:23):
where their son was. I think he got off on
other people's pain.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
That's very telling because, as you pointed out earlier, there
tends to be predicate acts in the past which provide
a pathway towards someone's offending at a higher level and
that behavior then watching someone else's suffering the entitlement to
take the boy's money, and then over the next few years,
(33:54):
as he gets older, he starts to steal more. He
starts to break into factories. It's a string of petty
larceny charges, and so you're starting to see somebody who
was very as you say, entitled.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, there's one thing with these petty larcenees. At the time,
after the war there were rations in place, and during
the war he actually went into the food tent and
stole food for himself. I mean, really, it's a case
(34:28):
of how low can you go in petty larceny. Everybody
was hungry during the war. These were soldiers and he
took their food, the protectors of the country. He had
no conscience.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
We didn't have a record of violent behavior before this.
But as you rightly point out, though, here's somebody who
has a strong sense of entitlement. His ego is very
strong and he is able to justify this. Let's look
at your theory. You can imagine a situation where he
knows that Shirley is to come to the party, it's
(35:08):
his brother's party. He may well indeed know that Ronald
Holmes is going to pick up Shirley from a railway station.
It's not inconceivable that he could have either been driving
past by accident or design, picks her up and decides, no,
I won't take you to the party. I'll take you
to a place. Because Kevin Willoughby had a connection to
(35:31):
the area near Mount Martha, didn't.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
He Yes, a lot of them did, though, so did
Ronald Holmes. A lot of the people in this because
that was the holiday, the place to go. I'd just
like to say on that that many people blamed the
landowner there and Merv Stanton I think was his name,
(35:57):
and it was assumed when we went out to Mount
Martha that he would be the person we would find.
Did it. People actually told us he did it. Well, no, no,
I don't think so, not at all. I think that
guy Merv suffered for many years. You know, it's not
just it goes so far beyond the victim and those
(36:21):
who die. It impacts their family, the people who are suspected,
and it's never resolved. It's a ripple effect. It is
brutal for so many generations.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
It does. And I think to be wrongly accused of
something like this will be henus and would follow you.
And you know, I think all those that were that
fell into the spotlight had to deal with it. But
I guess Kevin Willoughby was never in the spotlight, so
he was able to go the rest of his life
without him being questioned. I think he's the best possible suspect.
I mean, we can't rule out that a complete stranger
(37:00):
happened to see Shirley waiting at the train station on
her own offered her a ride, But to me, it's
highly unlikely, based on what we know about Shirley that
she's a young girl, she's nervous, she's not experienced. She
was told never get in a vehicle with a stranger,
and those things were powerful admonitions back in those days.
(37:21):
So I think suspicion rightly falls on Kevin Willoughby. You
made a strong case from his personality, the opportunity, the motive.
It's all there. The evidence may still be within the
coffers of Victoria Police two day. In fact, when they
set up the cold case unit back in I think
about twenty ten or twenty twelve, Shirley Collins was one
(37:44):
of the key cold cases they wanted to focus on,
and I remember retired Senior Sergeant Ron Iddalls describing that
this is one of the unfinished cases of his career
and obviously a number of police officers. But you look
at what may be held in the cold case fridge
at MacLeod the Forensic Services unit here in Melbourne, and
(38:05):
you think, is there a piece of her clothing, Is
there a piece of the concrete or the bottle that
was used to kill her? And could that now be
tested and established to a connection with Kevin Willoughby.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Well, I think so, because techniques have changed. I mean
that's one thing to say for Danelli. He bought in
all these experts for fingerprinting, new methods with ultra violet light,
for picking up fluorescent images, if you like dressing up
a model. That was the first time that that had
(38:45):
been done. A radio interview to call in for public help.
But I think if we look at the physical evidence
that they did collect back then, bottle glass fingerprints, possibly
even if the killer has blood, possibly because glass can cut.
(39:07):
What about the concrete pieces skin goes off onto that
These are methods unknown back then and even until recently,
wouldn't have yielded so much information. But this thing about
the crown top. These were unopened bottles, and so it's
what might have gone between the ridges of his hand
(39:31):
in holding it. There's so much evidence in the physical evidence.
There's so much information that we can still get.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I think it's a very strong point because we are
seeing that we're moving into an era where cold cases
can be solved by the use of this forensic investigative
genealogical where people can go with the slightest piece of
DNA and then build a family tree around that DNA
(40:04):
and come at potential suspects. Even today, and obviously Kevin
Willoughby died some time ago, the early two thousands, I believe,
so he's not going to give any DNA, but living
relatives certainly could. And I think we're going to see
more and more of these cases sold, and it's going
to come from work like yours, where people are raising suspicions,
(40:27):
looking at the evidence again and suggesting it's worth the
cold case detectives having another crack at this because old
Donnelly said in nineteen fifty six, I've not written this
case off as unsolvable, and I tend to agree with
him even more today than back in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Do you know what he did, Inspector Dannelly, even after
he semi retired someone else had taken over the case,
he actually sat down and wrote an article and published
it requesting that someone else take up the gauntlet, that
someone else pursued case of Shirley Collins's murder. I mean,
(41:09):
how devoted and dedicated was that guy. It's not just
that he really did turn over every stone available to
him in the nineteen seventies available to him, but he
remained devoted. And on that point, if police are carrying
(41:31):
these sorts of burdens with them after their retirement, they
really might need support. It's just another layer to this
book that police do do their best in most instances,
certainly in this one, and this guy carried that for life,
(41:53):
and so did the other police officer in Romana really did.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
And I think everyone in this case did their best,
and you can't say that all the time. And I
think you've also done your best to keep this case
alive because a lot of the when I saw that
newspaper headline and I discovered that Shirley's murder had ever
been so if you think who still cares about these
cold cases all these years later, there's no statute of
(42:17):
limitation on murder. And I think your book Inconceivable Malice
could be the basis of a new investigation if Victoria
Police is prepared to step into the future and run
these DNA off possible exhibits now. And I think this
is really a long shot, but you could get that
thousand pounds from the truth newspaper, Doctor Louise Steading, I
(42:40):
think you might be ah if we did.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
I put it to another case to try and get
the same sort of thing I was thinking to, you know,
even the sister of Shirley Collins foster sister. Her sister
was still alive, and in reference to the Colins family,
she wrote to me and said, thank you, thank you
(43:05):
for helping me understand why my parents were the way
they were. And I just that really struck me. This
is an elderly woman, the two brothers had deceased, probably
the other sister who's now deceased, and I thought, wow,
this really matters. This really matters to family and friends
(43:30):
who are still there and they are Thank.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
You so much for your time to wit, Louise. It's
been fantastic to talk to you about these theories, your
hard work on this case, and I really do thank
you very.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Much, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
That's doctor Louise Steading on the murder of Shirley Collins
back in nineteen fifty three. She never had the chance
to grow up, a life, have children. Her life was
cut short brutally, and there's still a chance to solve
these kinds of cases. The community deserves it, and the
loved ones of Shirley Lee Collins deserve it as well.
(44:07):
Let's hope Victoria Police can go into its cold case
freezer there at the Forensic Services Unit. Pull out these
exhibits and run them again, because you never know there
could be an answer there. If you have any cases
that you think we should be following up on Real
Crime with Adam Shann, get in touch please. You can
also crawl crime Stoppers one hundred, triple three, triple zero.
(44:27):
You can send me an email Adam Shann writer at
gmail dot com. This has been Adam Shan for Real Crime.
Thank you for listening.
Approache Production.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to Real Crime with Adam Shann. I'm your host,
Adam Shann. I've got a new collecting obsession old crime
headlines from Melbourne's Truth newspaper What's your goodbyfe for six
months back in the fifties costs about ten bucks a
day and second hand stores another day, came upon one
from October nineteen fifty four, but just jumped out of
(00:40):
me in screaming ninety six point type. Here's what it read,
How are you feeling? Killer? Did you like what you
read about your victim Shirley Collins at the Inquest this week?
How you took a fourteen year old girl for a
ride in a car to a deserted home in Mount Martha,
And when you got there, how you suddenly attacked her,
(01:03):
ripped off her clothing, savagely smashed her head in with
a bottle and pieces of concrete guttering. Did a great
shudder run through your body as she thought back to
the girl's agonized cries of the blood that must have
gushed onto your hands, your clothing. To shocking story. The victim,
(01:27):
Shirley Collins, was on her first adult night out on
September twelve, nineteen fifty three a birthday party. She was
last seen at North Richmond Railway station in inner city Melbourne.
Three days later, her battered corpse was found in a
driveway at Mount Martha, some eighty kilometers away. Police promised
(01:49):
a swift arrest for this heenous crime, Truth offered one
thousand pounds for information. I thought to myself, this crime
must have been solved long ago. I looked it up
and to my surprise, it still hasn't. So I thought,
how can I add a fresh angle to this? As
I'm pouring over Google, I see that a friend and colleague,
(02:13):
doctor Louise Steading, has done the work for me. Louise
is what I call an industrial strength forensic archaeologist. She's
taught forensic psychology, criminology, and policing to cops in two states,
among many thousands of other students. In a field where
once over lightly for the media is enough for many,
(02:34):
Louise digs deep and hard with passion and focus. She
and her partner Gerald now work on cold cases, going
back to the basics of the evidence and doing some
amazing work. Louise has spent years on Shirley's case and
has come up with what I believe is a very
credible suspect that everyone missed. And it's my pleasure to
(02:58):
welcome Louise to the Real Crime Studio today.
Speaker 1 (03:00):
Luise, Hello, Adam. We're back again to working together, so
that's great.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
The last time I was with you were up at
Sensible Creek near Charda's Towers looking for the remains of
Anita Cunningham, and you're still in that case, so I
really commend you for that.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Yeah, we're heading back up there. Hence we're on the road,
so excuse any passing cars or birds.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
The caravans on the road looking for looking for clues.
It's fantastic. What a life I envy. You tell me
who was Shirley Collins.
Speaker 1 (03:32):
Shirley Collins was a fourteen year old girl who was
heading off on her very first adult party. I mean,
it's very sad she never made it, tots. She was
also apparently do you know there are friends of hers
who was still alive. They meet each year. They're in
(03:53):
their eighties and they talk about Shirley. They described her
as a good girl. She was a quiet, industry good
girl who wouldn't get in the car of a stranger,
who had been well raised by foster parents, however, deserted
(04:16):
by her mother. I say mother because I think her
father was probably killed in the war. Her stepfather deserted
her her mother. The friends had often thought that her
mother didn't care for her, but I think that might
be wrong. Her mother had Her birth mother had a
(04:36):
criminal record and was basically in flight from the police
and headed up to Queensland. But devastating for a fourteen
year old.
Speaker 2 (04:47):
I think it was just minor larceny charges the theft
of a gold watch I believe, which I think Shirley
was possibly wearing.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yes, so, yes, that's what I thought.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
So on the night of September twelfth, nineteen fifty three,
she's heading to a party at Richmond. She's going to
be picked up by a colleague. She's working at GJ.
Cole's Variety store in Burke Street in Melbourne, and this
is her social network. Yeah, she's met people she's working
where she's the one of the younger ones at fourteen.
(05:21):
But she arranges to meet Ronald John Holmes, twenty one,
one of her workmates. He thinks they're meeting at Richmond Station.
She doesn't know about Richmond Station and so she goes
to North Richmond station.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
What happened next, Well, Ronald Holmes, he was her chaperone.
A lot of people thought, oh ah, this guy, because
of the seven year age difference, had something to do
with it. Maybe maybe not. At this stage, when Shirley
got off at the station, he wasn't anywhere. Ronald wasn't
(05:59):
anywhere to be seen. He probably went to a different station,
so she would have felt very stood up and humiliated.
He did too elsewhere. He added straight to the party
and actually told people he'd been stood up. But Shirley
wasn't seen again. Actually she wasn't seen since the bus stop.
(06:24):
She wasn't really seen until there's a change over between
bus and train. That's where she wasn't seen since.
Speaker 2 (06:32):
Because she's coming in from reservoir reservoir as we call
it down here, and she gets the train into North Richmond.
And as you say, she was not the kind of
girl to jump in a stranger's car. I think she
would have been more likely to have simply turned around
and gone home. But then there's a critical alleged sighting
(06:57):
at about eight o'clock. A woman is walking down from
Punt Road down Elizabeth Street, towards North Richmond station and
she sees a girl fitting Shirley Collins description, and she's
talking to a man in a car.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
Can I just interject there? Sure there's more than one
witness There were two. And these witnesses came forward two
months after Shirley's body was found. And this is a
huge discrepancy. This is a huge lapse of time that
impacts the reliability of memory. Also, we know that since
(07:36):
this time, many publications in the newspapers have been presented.
For example, one of the witnesses reported that she was
wearing a pearl necklace because that's how she was presented
in the actual newspaper. But in fact they found the
pearl necklace back at home. She hadn't worn it at all.
(08:00):
So when I looked at this book, I looked for
inconsistent seas and consistencies, and quite frankly, I pushed many
of the witnesses aside and try to trace steps. A
lot of this has to do with timing and movement.
(08:23):
That's how I look to do it.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Fascinating in your book, Inconceivable Malice, you do cast doubt
on these eyewitness accounts. You've always got to be careful
with thy witness accounts because they can be influenced by
what people have read. Memory fades away very quickly, as
you say, this was some weeks or months after the events.
So we really can't be sure that she even got
(08:48):
to North Richmond station, Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Yeah, But irrespective that even if she didn't get to
North Richmond station at some time, say Regent Street station
where the bus at the bus and the train intersection,
at some stage she got in a car and so
basically I take that and that car went to Mount Martha.
(09:14):
And this is why the timing I've looked at motor
vehicle speeds, traffic lights, headlights, lighting, weather, all that sort
of thing was raining and to narrow down time frames,
you look at I know it sounds gross, but maggots,
maggots that were found. You look at the last meal
(09:38):
that she had, the things that we know. Because I
must say, many of the witness accounts and people can
really want to help the police, but they can be
a huge distraction, a huge distraction if they're incorrect.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
You're right, everything is up for contests in this story.
Only thing we do know for certain is that nine
am Tuesday, three days almost three days after she disappears,
a retired businessman is walking his fox terrier Bombo along
Marine drive Mount Martha. Bombo runs up a driveway to
a vacant cottage, barking and comes back and tugs at
(10:19):
his master's leg, urging him to come see what he's found.
What does the witness find?
Speaker 1 (10:25):
Ah, this is crucial now, remembering that two days and
three nights have passed since she actually disappeared. She was
found with her head covered and her head smashed in,
her face smashed in. She was found naked from the
(10:46):
shoulders down except stocking down on one foot. Very staged,
a very staged position for a fourteen year old girl
absolutely dead. I know this sounds awful too, but dec imposing.
It's just imagine how that man felt in finding her. Anyway,
(11:14):
he called the police. Tromana police jumped to it very
quickly and they worked together with the police from Melbourne.
So it was really a good collaboration of many police
at the time of death.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
Became a critical element to this whole investigation because, as
you say, police put out calls for information, there was
a radio broadcast, there was pictures of Shirley in the
clothes that she wore, staged up with for the model
and so forth. And this brought a lot of information,
including some witness accounts from people in the Mount Martha
(11:51):
area that suggested that she might not have died on
the Saturday, but some days afterwards, which was very misleading.
It was indeed she was supposed to have been seen
in a hotel.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
In a shop as well, coffee shop, hotel. Well, the
thing is, you think, why on earth would someone do that,
Why on earth would they distract police? Well, it might
be that she's on their mind and they truly believe
that they've seen her and they don't want to not
give information into the police. But I don't actually think
(12:25):
that's what happened here. I think it was good publicity.
Quite frankly, I know that's callous, but I think that
the hotel owner or the shop owner that it brought
the client tell because it did to their premises and
increase their sales. It got them on the map, and
(12:48):
in this instance, it distracted police. It gave them theories
that didn't work, And it wasn't until the medical examiner
came up with his findings that they could refute all
of these unreliable sightings.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
And you can imagine how that was for Shirley's foster parents.
She is a quiet, conscientious girl. She's not experienced socially,
and suddenly she's turning up in hotels and drinking beer
and having meals with older men and so forth. So distressing.
But as you pointed out earlier, they.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Stood by her and said, no, no, she would not
have done that. That is not our girl. I thought
that was admirable.
Speaker 2 (13:40):
Correct. The medical examiner was critical on this because, as
you said, he looked at the contents of her stomach
and as you indelicately put it, the growth of maggots
on the body over those days, and you suddenly come
back to a very specific time of death. How has
that arrived at Louis.
Speaker 1 (13:56):
It's all from the first lane of eggs. He looked
at the laying of eggs and the timelines of the
different stages of development of maggots found in Shirley's body,
and a different method. Now this is important. These police
tried a different method from a different source of information.
(14:21):
That is a really good way of examining a case.
So the medical examiner also looked at her last meal,
and there was also a false report there too, but
it had certain elements in it that took quite a
long time to digest, Like it was pea and hand
(14:41):
soup and split peas take quite a long time to digest,
but not that long, and so the time was narrowed
in to around seven point thirty pm, so he arrived
at a time frame of between seven thirty pm and
(15:02):
eleven pm. When I mentioned Ronald Holmes earlier, her chaperone.
No matter how I looked at this, he did not
fit within the timeline. This person, the killer, had to
drive to Mount Martha and come back. Remember that Ronald
(15:26):
turned up at the party. The police even asked what
were you all doing at the time he arrived, what
were you watching? They were all watching motorbikes on probably
the TV, so they closed in. That's one person who
got eliminated. Now must say he was also a suspect,
(15:49):
quite a main one for me in the beginning. So
at that point when he did not fit, he got eliminated.
Set to the side, eliminated by me as a suspect,
as he I think was eliminated by the police too. Basically,
(16:10):
I pulled everybody in including the parents, including all the colleagues.
I pulled everybody in as a suspect, especially given that
eighty seven percent of murders are committed by people who
know the victim. Eighty seven percent they don't say to
(16:32):
what extent they know them. But here we've got a
whole bundle of work colleagues, we've got parents, foster parents,
and so on. So everybody became a focus, but not Ronald.
He got eliminated early on.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Well, you know, when I was reading the news clip
that I bought at the bazaar, I thought Ronald Holmes
was the obvious suspect. But when you look at the
drive that he had to make to pick her up
from the station, drive all the way to Mount Martha
Kill her drive back, but he's at the party by
nine point fifteen, so it's just not possible. Now, the
(17:12):
police did a pretty good job in this investigation. True
crime podcasters love dumping on the police, saying that, you know,
in these unsolved cold cases that the police missed this,
and they didn't do that, and they should have done this,
and the rest of it. But in this investigation, Victoria
police I think did a very good job, including the
Inspector Donnelly, who was in charge of the case. He
(17:33):
looked at this for years and years, and I think
he gave you a pretty good baseline of data to
look at. And I think one of the key things
was the meticulous crime scene photographs and descriptions which you've used.
And I'd like you if you could just to tell
us a bit more about that scene, because it was
(17:55):
striking for its barbarity and savagery. Tell us what did
they find and how had she been killed?
Speaker 1 (18:05):
One of the ways and one of the ways I
look at these scenes. So now I look at the landscape,
I look at all the physical remains, be that her
or bottles or concrete covered in blood. It was a
diabolical scene, or clothes strewn across the site itself, with
(18:26):
one shoe even up in a tree. So with this,
to me, every murder sight actually informs about the killer.
It's not just that they do or don't leave physical evidence.
They leave the psychological traces at this site as well. Now,
(18:47):
with this particular scene, Shirley was obsessively bashed. It was
really overkilled. This was obscene, and also that she was
naked and staged. Her legs were apart. It was horrible,
(19:08):
and she was actually found facing upwards, but the police
turned her over, so we've got an image of facing
up with the skirt that covers her head, that covers
her identity. So I actually, in my view, this guy
couldn't face her. But he was so angry that beer
(19:31):
bottles full not yet consumed, were not enough. He pulled
up concrete and smashed in caved in her face. I
was just going to say to you, there's something else
that struck me in one of the photographs. I know
I might have been seeing things, but I was sure
(19:53):
I could see a footprint or a shoe print on
her buttocks, and that was nothing that had ever been
commented on. So that just shows up in a I'm
seeing photo.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
As you say, it was so shocking, as quickly run
through what I've read of it from your book. By
the way, it looks like they've arrived there. They've walked
some distance up this driveway towards the cottage. He's carrying
full bottles of beer, possibly three.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
He struck her from behind with the bottle at least
once or probably twice. She's either unconscious or already dead. He
then pulls her skirt over her head, goes to the
nearby drain and picks up not one, but two pieces
(20:46):
of concrete guttering and comes back smashes her in the
head with this guttering and breaks every bone in her head.
It is shocking, and I'm sorry to go, but I
think it's really important because when you looked at this,
you apply a particular filter, which is the difference between
(21:09):
an organized and a disorganized defender. And what traces of
his personality did the killer leave behind. That's a big
part of your reasoning in this.
Speaker 1 (21:20):
Well, with this particular with this particular killer, I think
he actually left quite a few psychological hints there, and
in both the material and its organizational rather disarray. This
is fury and throwing things to the side. It's like
(21:41):
he had an uncontrollable rage, hitting her once on the
head from behind. So just note and all the details
to go with that. Let's note Shirley would not have
cried out because she wouldn't have been expecting a hit
from behind when she goes down. To actually be able
(22:02):
to lift those concrete pieces means he had strength, because
I think they were like fourteen pounds. It's a heavy weight.
He had a certain amount of physical strength. The site
was so disorganized that it suggests he didn't prepare. He
(22:24):
didn't have a shovel and bury her. He didn't come
along there with the intent to actually murder her. It
looks more like he was trying to seduce her with
the three bottles of beer. Which it also looks like
because she was facing the head's downhill, it looks like
(22:47):
she was heading back to the car. She wanted to
go back to the car at the point, the very
point he killed her or struck her on the head.
This suggests rejection. She rejected him and his beer in
his advances. She wasn't interested, and that's true to the
(23:07):
statements of the parents. I think parents are often the
first suspects, understandably, but once they're eliminated, they really need
to be listened to because they know her better than anyone.
I've just got something in my mind that I didn't
put in the book. He held those bottles in his hand.
(23:30):
If he's not prepared to kill her as in premeditated,
and it's this explosion of possibly humiliation at this rejection,
then he held the neck of the bottle and hit
her from behind. In those days, those bottles had the
(23:52):
metal caps, and if the police kept any of those
metal caps, I'll bet you there's a trace of skin
if they were stored correctly, his skin, not brs, would
be under the cap they were ridged.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
That's a very good point, and we'll get to that.
I gin guess is really important about and the possible
resolution of the case even now. Yeah, but what I
find fascinating here is most people would say is the
motive sex? Well, there was no evidence that she was
raped or otherwise molested, But as you point out in
your book, just penetration, if we'd use that word, is
(24:31):
not a complete description of a sexual motive. There are
other reasons connected to power and control, but still render
this a sexual motive. As you say, she could well
have rejected his advances and he reacts with rage.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yes, now hey's older, and we know because she got
into the car, most likely with someone she knew, because
that's in keeping with what we know of Shirley. This
is someone who had focused on her for quite a while,
I would say, and in making advances and wanting to
(25:10):
sit there and give alcohol to an underage kid, she
is a kid. Then the rejection for him was phenomenal
and so he flipped. Basically, that's right.
Speaker 2 (25:27):
And to come along story short, there's a number of
people who were going to this birthday party down on
Punt Road, Richmond. It was being held by one of
her work mates, Gavin Willoughby. There was a range of
other people from her workplace who were one by one
eliminated by police back in the day, and I think
you agree broadly that they don't really fit. But there
(25:48):
was one person who was never really eliminated, never really
interviewed by the police, and that was her boss at
GJ Coles. She worked in the tinware department at GJ
Coles in Burke Street, and her boss, there was a
guy called Kevin who was He was the brother of
the man having the birthday party. But what else did
(26:09):
you know about Kevin Kevin?
Speaker 1 (26:11):
Okay, he supervised Shirley, so he worked closely together with
Shirley in the ten department. Now, with Kevin, there's not
much written about him. But I did think that with
the ferocity of this attack and the lack of control
and explosive nature of the killer's actions, which I might
(26:35):
add this kind of lack of control and humiliation susceptibility
to humiliation makes him fairly an insecure kind of character,
fairly of weak character. To be insulted at a fourteen
year old puts him a little older. Anyway, back to
(26:57):
Kevin Willoughby, I started delving around, digging around, trying to
find more about him, and I figured that someone with
this kind of anger would have actually committed that a
similar or some kind of crime like this in the background,
or tortured animals or live buyers, or have been in
(27:22):
the theft. Because he's displaying a sense of entitlement, so
he felt entitled to Shirley, and when she rejected him,
that's when he exploded. If we work from that hypothesis,
there must be something else in his past.
Speaker 2 (27:45):
I think you've gone beyond what was in the evidence,
in the question, in the papers, and so forth. You
actually spoke to a friend of Shirley's, Maureen, who told
you that Shirley wanted to change her job because some
of her workplace was making things awkward for her. She
said he was mad married, and there you have another
(28:07):
raise of the stakes. If it was Kevin Willoughby, then
here's another reason to fear the consequences of what's happened
at Mount Martha.
Speaker 1 (28:18):
Yeah, absolutely right. So it's not just if this guy's married,
it could ruin his marriage. So there's divorce, there's more
humiliation in that that will become public knowledge. There's the
loss of his job, there's the huge connection to Shirley.
(28:41):
This guy's pedophile. Basically a killer and a pedophile. Extremely
don't true.
Speaker 2 (28:48):
And I think what also makes it difficult now to
determine this is that police didn't interview him, and the
party goers did not say whether he was at the
party and if so, what time he got there. But
you can back it in that he was probably there
at some state because this was his brother's day, Dan's birthday.
So Evan Willoughby unknown to the police, and they should
(29:10):
have realized this that he had a criminal background, and
even the lead detective in the murder, Donnelly, had dealt
with him earlier in a series of petty thefts and
so forth.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
That was a shock. When I searched around, he came
up in another inquest and it was a shock to
me that Danelly was one of two police officers who'd
actually interviewed Kevin Willoughby much earlier. And that's the point
it really was much earlier. He was a ten year
(29:46):
old boy, blonde hair, and later on he suddenly has
darker hair, and it's eighteen years later. Who on Earth's
going to recognize him? Dannelly didn't recognize him, and I
think that's understandable. He also wasn't the senior officer in
(30:07):
that particular investigation, but he did interview him, and it
was a bit of an awful inquest as well, involving Death's.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
Not because this is back in nineteen thirty five, when
an eight year old boy is pulled from a creek
in Hawthorne, and this is December nineteen thirty five, and
of course Kevin Willoughby is on the scene then as well.
They're playing together at Gardener Creek in Hawthorne and Bobby Glead,
(30:38):
the victim, ends up dead. Do you think Kevin Willoughby
had anything to do with Bobby's death?
Speaker 1 (30:46):
I certainly think he had a lot to do with
his death. Listen to this. He watched his friend two
years younger than himself drowning in that creek when someone else,
an adult, was on the other side of the creek
mowing grass. He didn't call out for help. He watched
(31:09):
for fifteen minutes, fifteen minutes until his friend little Bobby
didn't come up anymore. But it doesn't stop there. At
that point, after fifteen minutes, he didn't jump into the
creek to pull him out. He went over to his
friend's clothes, took money from his pockets, and then stumped
(31:35):
them into the mud. He then denied knowing to the
very family of Bobby and to the police. He denied
knowing the whereabouts of Bobby, and yet he led them
all on a wild goose chase, so one he quite
enjoyed leading them around and saying, oh, well, you know
(31:59):
he was down here when I last saw him. He
could be there, He could be there. It's disgraceful, and
I must say in the inquest the coroner also had
enormous skepticism of this. It remains an open case.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
And I think it's certainly very odd and very suspicious.
At the same time, I think you make the point
that his behavior at ten years of age suggests a
curiosity for watching other people's suffering. There's something not quite
right with this kid.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Yeah, there's a trait of young people the future psychopaths.
If you like hurting animals or watching this kind of
event with their best friend, and also stealing. He stole
money because he felt entitled to it. He also lied
(33:00):
to possibly protect himself, though he did get sprung, and
he felt amused perhaps at leading people on a wild
goose chase, watching their pain and suffering. The family he
led them down to the creek and didn't show them
(33:23):
where their son was. I think he got off on
other people's pain.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
That's very telling because, as you pointed out earlier, there
tends to be predicate acts in the past which provide
a pathway towards someone's offending at a higher level and
that behavior then watching someone else's suffering the entitlement to
take the boy's money, and then over the next few years,
(33:54):
as he gets older, he starts to steal more. He
starts to break into factories. It's a string of petty
larceny charges, and so you're starting to see somebody who
was very as you say, entitled.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Yeah, there's one thing with these petty larcenees. At the time,
after the war there were rations in place, and during
the war he actually went into the food tent and
stole food for himself. I mean, really, it's a case
(34:28):
of how low can you go in petty larceny. Everybody
was hungry during the war. These were soldiers and he
took their food, the protectors of the country. He had
no conscience.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
We didn't have a record of violent behavior before this.
But as you rightly point out, though, here's somebody who
has a strong sense of entitlement. His ego is very
strong and he is able to justify this. Let's look
at your theory. You can imagine a situation where he
knows that Shirley is to come to the party, it's
(35:08):
his brother's party. He may well indeed know that Ronald
Holmes is going to pick up Shirley from a railway station.
It's not inconceivable that he could have either been driving
past by accident or design, picks her up and decides, no,
I won't take you to the party. I'll take you
to a place. Because Kevin Willoughby had a connection to
(35:31):
the area near Mount Martha, didn't.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
He Yes, a lot of them did, though, so did
Ronald Holmes. A lot of the people in this because
that was the holiday, the place to go. I'd just
like to say on that that many people blamed the
landowner there and Merv Stanton I think was his name,
(35:57):
and it was assumed when we went out to Mount
Martha that he would be the person we would find.
Did it. People actually told us he did it. Well, no, no,
I don't think so, not at all. I think that
guy Merv suffered for many years. You know, it's not
just it goes so far beyond the victim and those
(36:21):
who die. It impacts their family, the people who are suspected,
and it's never resolved. It's a ripple effect. It is
brutal for so many generations.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
It does. And I think to be wrongly accused of
something like this will be henus and would follow you.
And you know, I think all those that were that
fell into the spotlight had to deal with it. But
I guess Kevin Willoughby was never in the spotlight, so
he was able to go the rest of his life
without him being questioned. I think he's the best possible suspect.
I mean, we can't rule out that a complete stranger
(37:00):
happened to see Shirley waiting at the train station on
her own offered her a ride, But to me, it's
highly unlikely, based on what we know about Shirley that
she's a young girl, she's nervous, she's not experienced. She
was told never get in a vehicle with a stranger,
and those things were powerful admonitions back in those days.
(37:21):
So I think suspicion rightly falls on Kevin Willoughby. You
made a strong case from his personality, the opportunity, the motive.
It's all there. The evidence may still be within the
coffers of Victoria Police two day. In fact, when they
set up the cold case unit back in I think
about twenty ten or twenty twelve, Shirley Collins was one
(37:44):
of the key cold cases they wanted to focus on,
and I remember retired Senior Sergeant Ron Iddalls describing that
this is one of the unfinished cases of his career
and obviously a number of police officers. But you look
at what may be held in the cold case fridge
at MacLeod the Forensic Services unit here in Melbourne, and
(38:05):
you think, is there a piece of her clothing, Is
there a piece of the concrete or the bottle that
was used to kill her? And could that now be
tested and established to a connection with Kevin Willoughby.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
Well, I think so, because techniques have changed. I mean
that's one thing to say for Danelli. He bought in
all these experts for fingerprinting, new methods with ultra violet light,
for picking up fluorescent images, if you like dressing up
a model. That was the first time that that had
(38:45):
been done. A radio interview to call in for public help.
But I think if we look at the physical evidence
that they did collect back then, bottle glass fingerprints, possibly
even if the killer has blood, possibly because glass can cut.
(39:07):
What about the concrete pieces skin goes off onto that
These are methods unknown back then and even until recently,
wouldn't have yielded so much information. But this thing about
the crown top. These were unopened bottles, and so it's
what might have gone between the ridges of his hand
(39:31):
in holding it. There's so much evidence in the physical evidence.
There's so much information that we can still get.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
I think it's a very strong point because we are
seeing that we're moving into an era where cold cases
can be solved by the use of this forensic investigative
genealogical where people can go with the slightest piece of
DNA and then build a family tree around that DNA
(40:04):
and come at potential suspects. Even today, and obviously Kevin
Willoughby died some time ago, the early two thousands, I believe,
so he's not going to give any DNA, but living
relatives certainly could. And I think we're going to see
more and more of these cases sold, and it's going
to come from work like yours, where people are raising suspicions,
(40:27):
looking at the evidence again and suggesting it's worth the
cold case detectives having another crack at this because old
Donnelly said in nineteen fifty six, I've not written this
case off as unsolvable, and I tend to agree with
him even more today than back in nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
Do you know what he did, Inspector Dannelly, even after
he semi retired someone else had taken over the case,
he actually sat down and wrote an article and published
it requesting that someone else take up the gauntlet, that
someone else pursued case of Shirley Collins's murder. I mean,
(41:09):
how devoted and dedicated was that guy. It's not just
that he really did turn over every stone available to
him in the nineteen seventies available to him, but he
remained devoted. And on that point, if police are carrying
(41:31):
these sorts of burdens with them after their retirement, they
really might need support. It's just another layer to this
book that police do do their best in most instances,
certainly in this one, and this guy carried that for life,
(41:53):
and so did the other police officer in Romana really did.
Speaker 2 (41:57):
And I think everyone in this case did their best,
and you can't say that all the time. And I
think you've also done your best to keep this case
alive because a lot of the when I saw that
newspaper headline and I discovered that Shirley's murder had ever
been so if you think who still cares about these
cold cases all these years later, there's no statute of
(42:17):
limitation on murder. And I think your book Inconceivable Malice
could be the basis of a new investigation if Victoria
Police is prepared to step into the future and run
these DNA off possible exhibits now. And I think this
is really a long shot, but you could get that
thousand pounds from the truth newspaper, Doctor Louise Steading, I
(42:40):
think you might be ah if we did.
Speaker 1 (42:44):
I put it to another case to try and get
the same sort of thing I was thinking to, you know,
even the sister of Shirley Collins foster sister. Her sister
was still alive, and in reference to the Colins family,
she wrote to me and said, thank you, thank you
(43:05):
for helping me understand why my parents were the way
they were. And I just that really struck me. This
is an elderly woman, the two brothers had deceased, probably
the other sister who's now deceased, and I thought, wow,
this really matters. This really matters to family and friends
(43:30):
who are still there and they are Thank.
Speaker 2 (43:33):
You so much for your time to wit, Louise. It's
been fantastic to talk to you about these theories, your
hard work on this case, and I really do thank
you very.
Speaker 1 (43:40):
Much, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
That's doctor Louise Steading on the murder of Shirley Collins
back in nineteen fifty three. She never had the chance
to grow up, a life, have children. Her life was
cut short brutally, and there's still a chance to solve
these kinds of cases. The community deserves it, and the
loved ones of Shirley Lee Collins deserve it as well.
(44:07):
Let's hope Victoria Police can go into its cold case
freezer there at the Forensic Services Unit. Pull out these
exhibits and run them again, because you never know there
could be an answer there. If you have any cases
that you think we should be following up on Real
Crime with Adam Shann, get in touch please. You can
also crawl crime Stoppers one hundred, triple three, triple zero.
(44:27):
You can send me an email Adam Shann writer at
gmail dot com. This has been Adam Shan for Real Crime.
Thank you for listening.
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