August 14, 2024 • 35 mins
In 1984, Margaret Tapp and her nine-year-old daughter Seana were found dead in their beds, still in their nightgowns.
The killer surely strangled Margaret first. It's inconceivable she would not have fought to save her little girl.
9-year-old Seana died the same way, except she was raped first.
Journalist and author of Life & Crimes, Andrew Rule covered the story when it first broke in the 1980s and now years later, he's adamant that reporters and police sometimes get it wrong - including him.
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Guest: Journalist, podcaster and author of Life & Crimes, Andrew Rule
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:11):
You're listening too. A Mother MEA podcast, Mother Mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waders. This podcast was
recorded on It's about eleven PM in the winter of
nineteen eighty four in a suburban street in Melbourne, and
Rosalind Bomford wakes with a start. She can hear what
(00:33):
sounds like a muffled scream coming from the neighbor's house.
She waits listening. Her dog growls, but then there's silence.
Surely she was mistaken. Across the street, another neighbor hears
a sound. Closer to midnight. The Tap family dog is howling.
They've never heard the little dog so frantic. The spaniel
(00:57):
belongs to shawna Tap. She's only nine. She lives in
the ordinary, single story home with her fourteen year old
brother Justin, and their mother, Margaret, a local nurse, a
single mum and a part time law student. Pretty soon
the night is quiet again. But what is discovered the
following day in the fern Tree Gully home is so horrible.
(01:18):
The season detective who discovers it can't help but weep
when he goes home that evening. A crime so harrowing
it should be among Australia's most infamous, but instead, all
these years later, it's obvious this case has fallen through
the cracks. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime
(01:46):
Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes
by speaking to the people who know the most about them.
A warning. What happened to Shauna and Margaret tap on
a Tuesday night in August four decades ago is hard
to hear a crime so harrowing it should be one
that's etched into our bones. The killer surely strangled Margaret first.
(02:10):
It's inconceivable she would not have fought to save her
little girl. Shauna died the same way, except she was
raped first. Both the mother and daughter were found still
in their nightgowns in their beds. Their names Arena's familiar
as some of the most famous crimes of our generation,
and yet this happened in a regular Aussie home, to
a loving family at the foothills of the Dandenong Rangers.
(02:34):
To help us understand the crime, the coverage, and the
police investigation that went cold, we're joined by journalist, podcaster
and author of Life and Crimes Andrew Ruhl, who covered
the story when it first broke in the nineteen eighties.
In more recent stories covering the case, Andrew is adamant
reporters and police sometimes get it wrong, including him. Andrew
(02:58):
joins us. Now, Andrew, I want to start with, do
you remember the night or the day that the Margaret
and shawna Tap murders came through.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
This is the interesting thing. It was a relatively minor
I wasn't a minor murder. It was a double murder
of a mother and daughter. But it didn't achieve the
splash that it might have had circumstances been slightly different.
Looking back on it, I was amazed years later to
look back and see that it only generated something like
(03:35):
five news stories in newspapers. Five only do you mean.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
In that initial kind of breaking news stay.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
In that first year or whatever, you know when it happened, right, Yeah,
it wasn't massive news for days and weeks because there
were no developments. And also in those cases, usually the
police will wheel out the grieving relatives who make appeals
and there's you know, heartbroken people pictures. The family of
Margaret Tap, for better or worse, were obviously greed stricken, heartbroken.
(04:04):
They are also shocked, and they are also religious people,
very respectable, and they were sort of scandalized. Apart from
all the rest of the stuff, they were scandalized about
her lifestyle, which she'd had a lot of different blogs
to visit her and so on, and so they didn't
really want to drag it all through the media, and
so they did no media and it died to death.
(04:26):
And that story, I'm ashamed to say that the media
of which I was a part really didn't get teeth
into it for years. And the biggest story ever written
was on the twentieth anniversary of the murders. I went
back to it and said, I'm going to do this
properly now, and I did it twenty years later.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
For those that haven't heard the story, because as you've said,
it's not a really well known case, let's talk about
some of the details. Firstly, Fern Tree Gully, I mean,
I've never heard of it. What's that area of Melbourne, like.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Outer of eastern suburbs, probably now a bit like then
working class and up a fair way out out of east.
This is towards the dandiong Rangers.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Family suburbia kind of.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Oh, definitely family out of suburbia. You know, it's well out.
It's thirty odd case from the central city. They were
in Calvin Drive, which is just off Ferntree Gully Road,
a major busy road, and you could hear that traffic
from their house. Their house is number thirteen, so it
was only six houses off the big road. It was
a rented house which she'd taken possession of through an
(05:29):
affair she had with the doctor who bought it for her,
which is relevant because his widow, the doctor's widow, was
one of the suspects for the murder wrongly in my view,
a ridiculous suspect, but the police were pretty keen on
her for a while and thought she'd had Margaret knocked
off by a murdering pedophile, which would strike me as
a fairly long shot that a doctor's widow would employ
(05:52):
a hipman who was also an active pedophile who was
sexually assault the child. Shawna Well kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Gives you an idea of what the police were working with,
which is not a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Not a lot, and the police don't always get it right.
In the eighties in Melbourne homicide Squad had patchy results,
and in the seventies with several murders that didn't get
investigated properly in my view, for various reasons. One is
they were busy doing other things, and of course in
those days they didn't have all the things that we
have now to find people. These days, you go out
(06:24):
and say, where's the cameras on them highway, where's the
cameras at the seven to eleven, where's the cameras next door?
Where's the credit card stuff? And all that registration plate recognition.
None of that existed. So if somebody got away with
murder in nine to eighty four or before, if they
shut up about it, they had a big chance of
getting away with it for good.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
From your recollection, what happened to Margaret and shaunatap late
on the.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Night of August seventh, So the Los Angeles Olympics are
on at this stage, someone a male person obviously, has
entered the house without forcing anything. This would suggest there
was somebody that might have had some knowledge of the place,
or that they knew possibly, but those who knew them
well knew that the back door didn't lock properly. It
(07:12):
was faulty, and you could walk in the back door
quite easily, and that would have been known to a
few people. Next day, the little girl next door usually
walked to school with Shauna, and Shawna was nine years old.
She looked up no sign, as Shauna, the blinds are
still drawn, the newspaper is still on the porch. The
(07:32):
newspapers delivered, it hadn't been picked up, and she wondered,
what's happening. So she walked to school by herself. Later
that afternoon, a man who knew Margaret, a nice fellow carpenter,
armless guy. He came around to see her to see
if she wanted to go to the opera with him,
and knock, knock, knock, no sign. Her brother in law
(07:55):
is another one who turned up and saw the paper,
saw the lockdoor, no sign. One of those two guys, Jim,
the carpenter, the friend of the opera guy. He goes
in the back door and finds the crime scene. He
finds both of them in beds with the covers pulled
up to their necks as if it's done by somebody
(08:16):
covering up the crime, the psychology of it, and both
of them had been strangled with something. In the case
of Shawna, the nine year old girl, there was seamen
found on her night dress, which would suggest a sort
of a sexual motive. So this wasn't a burglary gone wrong.
This wasn't a hit on Margaret performed by a hitman.
(08:36):
This was a weird sexual murder. Perhaps somebody has known
to them that had done something bad with Shauna, and
then Margaret realized or yelled, or you know, the little
girl yelled, and maybe then the perpetrator killed both the
cover up. This is what it looks like to me.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I know you've spoken to one of the detectives that
found that scene and he was pretty shaken up by it,
wasn't he.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I mean, there's detectives, many of them are married with kids.
It does shake them up when they see dead kids.
That really wears them. The problem with this whole case,
and there's no use sugar coating it, is that from
the start the police wasn't a case of not having suspects.
They had too many, and all about equal height. So okay,
let's look at Margaret. Who's she know, her ex husband
(09:19):
that she divorced five years earlier. Get him in. He'll
be good. Well he's not, he's harmless, alibi, not a problem.
Then the Margaret's sister's boyfriend, he was sort of brother
in law. He'd come around there. They'd have to clear him.
Then the alleg's boyfriend, the guy that came around to
take her to the opera, But he was a harmless
guy and nice guy. These three they clear rapidly. Then
(09:40):
there's Margaret's brother, who's a strange cat. Lindsey. I talked
to him quite a lot, and he worked at the
local council with a lot of rough guys, truck drivers
and sort of rough blugs. Some of them might had
a bit of form for crimes. One of them drove
a really hot Falcon newt red with mags. Such a
vehicle was seen in that street at some point that week.
(10:04):
Some of those guys had helped move furniture into the
house as a favor to the brother, so you had that.
Then Margaret, she was a nurse at a local hospital
in the Hills. She was very friendly with a lot
of different doctors. She'd had affairs with seven of them,
including a leading an ethetist.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
There were all of those, so seven more suspects.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Well potentially. And then she was a nurse, but she
was doing law at Monash University because she wanted to
become a medico legal. She was bright, she was smart.
She clearly had an enormously warm and engaging personality because
men just fell for her one after the other. She
was clearly an intriguing person with a force field of charisma.
(10:47):
You know, she'd met a guy at UNI that used
to come over and see her. And then she was
having truck driving lessons from a bloke who had a truck,
who was giving a lessons driving the truck. And so
there's you know, ten eleven, twelve suspects right there, let
alone anyone those guys knew what about that guy's friend,
what about that guy's brother. And in the end it
(11:09):
sort of collapsed under the way to all these potential
suspects that I don't believe were cleared properly back then
and only half heartedly cleared later because Margaret's brother, Lindsay,
assured me that he hadn't been cleared by DNA samples
until twenty years later, a big gap he himself. Now
he had to be regarded as a suspect.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Because they had DNA from the scene, They had DNA
from this, they had semen, they had fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
They did not have finger or footprints. They had a footprint.
The one clue no one's ever been able to explain
it who it is, if it's innocent, was the footprint
of a Volley sanchu. Now you may not remember them,
but when I was young, everybody had Volly sancho's that
are Rippley sold.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Now they're back again, they're back, pleased to know.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
And you know everyone more than then. They wore them
with jeans. And it was a thing, and it was
a certain size, and it had left a mark on
a clean floor because it had been recently used on it.
Probably they think on an onto car tennis court, you know,
the red dust tennis courts. And I were never able
to work out whose it was, and it would strike
(12:14):
you as a very intriguing clue. I have to say.
Among the other clues we haven't been through. Down the
road was a kid that all the neighbors said, this
kid's win, he's a teenager, right them down on his
bike and make filthy comments to women working in the garden.
I went and found this guy as an adult, very
strange cat, but he knew exactly where the grave was.
(12:35):
Explained to me how to go to their graves to Margaret,
and he said, yeah, you're going there, and then you
walk about fifty minutes in your turn left at a
black grave and it's a shiny one. He knew it precisely.
Just down the road, I think next to his house
was a house full of pretty rough people. One of
them had some form for badness and madness. His sister
lived at a caravan out the back of the house.
(12:58):
That guy did jail for rape on a separate case.
So our pool of potential suspects is what thirteen and
fourteen and fifteen, But.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
That shouldn't matter, doesn't a police investigation.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
It's interrogated that I found those guys. I found those
brothers from that house. They were all rough heads. Obviously
they can't all be guilty or none of them are guilty, right,
And I spoke to them. They said, yeah, the couples
should have come and say ah's he said, I was
working night shift. I was a perfect candidate. Why didn't
they come and talk to me and clear mate? Why
didn't they clear my brother? Yeah? They reckoned. The police
just didn't do their job properly, so it fell through cracks.
(13:33):
Another potential thing is, you know, Shauna was a Brownie,
the junior girl gods. We now know looking back on it,
that girl gods, brownies, cubs, scouts were full of pedophiles, which,
looking back, with the wisdom and mindsight, you think that
would have to be an interesting connection. Having gone through
all these things, I wrote a big story about it
(13:53):
twenty years later and since then. Some years ago now
I was approached by a young man said he was
a friend of the estranged children of a local doctor
from up there. This doctor was a GP who lived
in the dandinongs, so Danny Loong Rangers. I've got pleased
hills with trees and birds and flowers and pedophile doctors.
(14:15):
This doctor was popular, He was well known. He was
well liked by some people, not by others. He had
three kids of his own. Turned out he was a
sexual deviate of the darkest dye. Turns out that he
molested a lot of kids, including his own, and including patients.
So this is an interesting figure because he was very
(14:37):
well known up there as a GP. He would go
regularly to that hospital where Margaret worked. He wasn't one
of the hospital doctors, but he would go there to
treat you know, somebody's granny or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
So it's another potential call totally.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
And he was a sexual predator, and he was a
good looking athletic tennis playing fellaw.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Right, and he's never been investigated for this crime.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Well, that's a good question. When I was told about
this fellow only a few years ago. Now they nailed
one pedophile incident to him, obviously it'll be one of many.
But and he got struck off as a doctor. His
wife left him, his kids hated him, and he moved
up to a riverside town on the Murray River where
a lot of people go to retire and play golf.
(15:21):
That's where he's gone. And not long ago, a couple
of years ago, I went up there and sat off
his house and watching Walky's little dog down the street.
And everybody locally knows who he is in the background,
and they all watch him, all the parents. If he
ever steps out of line, he'll end up in the Murray.
That guy is intriguing because he played tennis with a
(15:42):
group of other men, one of whom I know. One
of them was the father of a girl that was
molested by this doctor, and he used to play at
a little tennis caught up there Fernie Creek and it
had an onto car court, you know, the red dust stuff.
I'm told that his feet were about the right size
for the shoes. Now, whether that's just a lot of coincidences,
(16:06):
I don't know. It may well be, but he's a
doctor that should easily have known Margaret. He played tennis
e will volley sanshoes. He was a sexual predator. He
was a sexual predator with a lot to lose and
later lost it. He was a big, strong, sort of
athletic guy, be quite capable of strangling mother and daughter there.
(16:27):
He is living in a country town in New South
Wales on the just on that side of the river.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Jimmy Bath.
I'm speaking with Andrew Ruhle about the murder of Shawna
and Margaret. Tap up next, we discover why this unsolved
case didn't get the coverage it deserved. It's interesting because
(16:58):
hearing that obviously there's a lot of alarm bells there,
but then there's another really credible suspect that you write
about a lot, which was Margaret's dad's friend, the ex
policeman who we haven't even.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
I haven't because there's number what don't we can talk
about him? He died. I went knocked on his door
twenty years ago to find he was on a cruise somewhere.
He was an amateur door but he used to paint.
He painted a picture after Margaret and Shawna were murdered
of Shauna beside a campfire, and it ended up with
(17:30):
uncle Lindsey, with Shauna's uncle. He sent me a photograph
of it, and I was very intrigued by they saying
Cook he was a bit of a predatory guy. That
doesn't make him a killer and a pedophile. I have
to say he was an old copper that he'd known
the family for years. They were sort of friends. I
reckon he was in the Masonic lodge with Margaret's father.
(17:53):
I reckon there's a bit of a bond there, which
might be one of the reasons the case didn't get
publicized much. The police force in those days. There are
a lot of that Masons versus Catholics very big in
the police force until recent times, and those sort of
things would apply that if they said, oh, he's a
brother and he does on this publicized it's embarrassing. That
might well happen. So that fellow Anne Cook. He'd known
(18:16):
Margaret when she was a young runaway. She'd run away
from home at sixteen, and he'd gone to Saint Kildraa
somewhere and picked her up and brought her home. But
he used to visit and she used to complain to
her sister, so that bloody and Cook's coming around here.
Da da da da da. And he was allowed back
into the crime scene. He said to retrieve a book
or books or letters or something, and the coppers let
(18:39):
him in because he was either still a serving copper
or just out of the job. Now that puts him
at the crime scene. That means he can get his
fingerprints there legitimately, which covers him if his prince are
found back. I think so, But very hard to get
the sense out of the police later, because I think
there were a lot of gaps. They had different waves
(19:00):
of DNA test over twenty years, and they didn't clear
everybody in the first instance. When DNA came in, they
cleared you know, a short listen, and they cleared a
few more, and then a few more. And if if
these guys were too far away or too hard to find,
I think they slipped through the net for a long time.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Would you give people a little bit of an idea
of the developments that did happen. They did actually charge
someone with the murders in two thousand and eight. Tell
us about that.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Well, there's front page news.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Finally makes sense.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It was leaked by a friendly homicide squad detective to
a colleague of mine. You know, big breakthrough. We've got him.
He's a boats in jail at Sale, which is a
regional city in Victoria. We've had a match with DNA.
It's him and front page news. Great crime solved. And
then there's a photograph of Margaret's poor ole father holding
(19:50):
a photograph of Margaret and a little girl and wrong.
Within days, turns out that he's been a balls up
in the laboratory. They'd spatted DNA around the room and
had fallen on the microscope and it wasn't him at all.
He gave no comment interview, which made the place pretty
keen on him. But when his lawyer pointed out that
(20:10):
his client was in Darwin at the time, provably or somewhere,
it all fell apart and they realized it was a
screw up at the lab not the only screw up.
They've had the lab either, it has happened before.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
It just feels like with this police investigation, there was holes,
but then there was these big bungles that happened.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Oh yeah, tell me a better. Homicide squads are interesting.
They're regarded as an elite squad, but they're regarded as
sort of corruption free because there'sn't a lot of opportunity. Really,
those would be good detectives doing their best, and most
of them are or were. But you have to realize
that homicide scott is mostly a case of turning up
at an address where somebody's rung in and said two
(20:51):
dead on the floor, and they go in and there's
you know, mumster skilled dab with a breadknife and says,
I'm sorry, I couldn't take it anymore. Take me to jail.
You know, it's that easy. Most homicides, eight out of
ten of them, are like that. Their clean up rates
are artificially inflated by those walk up starts. It's not
like catching arm robbers who run away from you and
(21:11):
are good crooks. You're catching basically mostly people that have
been involved in a once in a lifetime domestic incident
where a murders b and then says, you got me GV.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Can we compare it, because when you look at this
story on its own, it feels kind of mind blowing,
all of the mistakes. Let's compare it to one of
the stories that you cover in your latest book, which
is the Easy Street Street which most people will know about.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Easy Street correctly has become one of the most celebrated
unsolved cases in Australia. I guess there's others that compare
in scope. It's two young women with a little child
in the house who wasn't hurt. The two suits. One
was Suzanne, one was Susan, our friends. They were living
together in a rented housing Easy Street, Collingwood in Melbourne
(21:58):
in a suburbs nineteen seventy seven, very hot summer. They're
found by a neighbor who'd found their dog wandering around
and went through the back gate in the back door
and walked down the hall and found a total scene
of chaos and blood everywhere. Both of them stabbed to
death multiple times. And in the middle bedroom. There were
two bedrooms and a long, thin terrace house. So one
(22:21):
is dead in the front room. Then there's a middle
room with a little boy dehydrated, very thirsty, very sad
eighteen month old baby Greg in his cot and then
then the other young woman is dead in the other bedroom,
stabbed in a frenzy by an unknown assailant. Similar problem.
The police when they looked into it, they said, oh god,
(22:41):
you know, says An Armstrong was going out with this
sheer from Euroa and his brothers knows them, and then
there's this one. They backtrack and find all these different
people that had been the parties there whatever, and in
the end the police couldn't sort of work out who
was the best candidate, and they ended up with a
least to go to and no pretty keen on a
few of them. They were keen on Susan Armstrong's boyfriend,
(23:05):
but ultimately they got nowhere. It was a very patchy investigation.
Another generation of police were shocked when they pulled out
the easy Street file. It was a Manila a little
Manila folder with twenty four sheets of paper in it.
I mean, school essays are longer than that, you know.
It was just rubbish and they had bugger roll. They
just didn't get anywhere. And again they had too many
(23:28):
potential candidates. One guy climbed through a window after the
murders gone in and left a note for them on
a cigarette packet, you know, ring me on this number.
The police track him down and said what's with you,
and he said, well, I've been there before. I knew
I had to open the window, but I didn't go
that way towards the bedrooms. And he was one of
two people that did that. The boyfriend, the sheerer guy,
(23:49):
had also walked in the back door and called out
no answer, so he didn't being a well mannered country boy,
he did not walk up into the house. He just
called that from the kitchen. So two different men that
are known have been in that house after the murders.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Do you think that particular case did get more attention
from police in the end because it was getting more
attention from us, from the public, from the media.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Big media story. Easy Street. There's something about the name
that just works. It's the Beaumont children an Easy Street
have always been. They just caught the imagination, they caught
the headlines, and people never forgot them. You know. The
Margaret tap case actually is just as awful in every way,
but never caught attention in the same way. And that's
(24:35):
why I concentrated on it years later to sort of
remedy that.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
And what do you put that down to?
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Well, is nowhere to go. See, the thing is about
day to day reporting. You need a development of some sort,
or you need somebody saying tomorrow we're going to have
Margaret's sister, and next day we're going to have a grandma,
and next day we're going to you know, we're going
to have something. So everything just split it out. It
was awful and I feel bad that that's what happened.
But it wasn't a media conspiracy. It wasn't a police conspiracy.
(25:03):
To some extent, it was the family. If the family
had been really keen to pursue it, they would have
fed the media. They weren't going to do that.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
I think it also comes down to what people want
to read as well.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It does. And you know what, there's not an appetite
for child's sex stories. I have to say, they're so
awful abhorrent that nobody approaches them the way we approach
when a gangster gets shot, happy days, it's wonderful. As
long as no one innocent gets hurt, we're all happy.
No one thinks it's a great story to do something
about a dead child that's been sexually assaulted, it's just
(25:37):
too awful to contemplate.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
When you did pick up the story twenty years after
the fact and started writing about it again, did you
find that people were interested they wanted to hear more.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Well, they really. If you write a story graphically enough
and with some sort of style and timing and effect,
that people will read it for sure. But it wasn't
until I did it for Good Weekend magazine. It was
the twentieth anniversary of Good Weekend Magazine and it was
the twentieth anniversary of the Tap murder, so that was
the perfect crime story to put in that mag and
(26:19):
I did it as a big, long piece. It's probably
five thousand words and read, examining a case that most
people couldn't remember or had never heard of. No one
in Sydney would have heard of it at all before that.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
I don't think many people in Australia might.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Have heard of it. Oh true, But I'm just saying, yeah,
I mean some Melbourne people. I mean I certainly remembered
it happening, but I was a crime reporter, so naturally
I should remember. But it's only become more notorious in
the last twenty years, when we'd focused on it a bit.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Do you think that that crime could ever be solved
now that we are forty years down the track.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
It depends on whether they have usable DNA. I don't
know if they have or not. And if they have,
who knows. One day somebody somewhere might fall into the net.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I want to ask you more generally, because you've written
about a lot of crime in your career, what has
it taught you about people looking into the worst of society.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Nature and nurture both apply. But most of the most
awful violent killers have been to a large extent, created
by what happened to them as kids. And this is
not to excuse anyone, but I've just realized in the
last decade or so that I keep saying these patterns emerge.
(27:34):
The family caught bomber up here. Leonard the mad fireman,
killed people everywhere, shot them, he bombed them, he burnt
places down, He did terrible things, very angry man. And
when you go back and look at that story, you
go now, Leonard was all right until his mom died
when he was ten, and then he ends up in
that notorious boy's home where kids were abused. And so
(27:57):
this smiling little kid pictured in grade six, by the
time he's fourteen, he's sullen and vengeful and weird. Were
why because he went to that place and he will
have been raped undoubtedly that place. Christoph Dale Flannery, the
big time hit man, was disappeared in Sydney, murdered by
gangster's prolific killer known as Renter Kill. Very violent man
(28:21):
was sent to a boy's home in Victoria called Morning Star,
run by the Franciscan monks. His cousin told me that
he used to cry when he talked about what had
happened to him at the boy's home. Now, this is
true of so many of these guys that if you
go back through it, you find out that they were exposed.
(28:41):
I can do this for an hour. I can tell
you examples of it, and I won't bore you with it.
But trust me, so many of them, including that you know,
the Russell Street bombs in Melbourne, the old guy Stan Taylor,
who was the mentor to those young bucks. He had
been put in a Salvation Army boy when he was
nine for good reason. His own life would have been awful.
(29:02):
His father was a brute. He'd been brutalized as a youngster,
an intelligent youngster, brutalized and then always trying to get
back at the world in some way, and it turns
them into very, very violent, evil people. And I think
that's something I've realized more and more and more that
you see that pattern repeated often.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
What about the criminal justice system, because I think doing
this podcast, obviously there are so many police officers out
there doing the right thing, but then there are certain
cases like the one we've been talking about today, where
things haven't been done correctly, people have potentially fallen through
gaps or there's corruption. What have you learned from that
or do you feel a bit jaded?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, Look, I think police forces have probably improved in
many ways. I think they're more honest now, please, Because
it used to be a step away from poverty for
working class boys. If you're big and strong and were
smart enough to get into the police source. You had
to have a certain level of proficiency. It was a
way to get away from swinging a pick or you know,
(30:06):
working on the tramways. It became a very corrupt brotherhood
for that reason that these were poor people on the
make they were battling to pay off a house, battling
to pay off a car, and the way they could
do that on their relatively poor wages was to take
money from sp bookies and from publicans and whatever else.
(30:26):
And that's what made police force, particularly in New South
Wales and Queensland but everywhere. That's what fostered that low
hum of corruption that bloomed magnificently in Sydney. I have
to say where it went right to the top. These days,
police work I think is more of a middle class
aspirational thing, and that you know, you may well know
(30:48):
people that are police officers. I'm getting your parents may
not have had a while guest, you know, back in
the day, or your grandparents. I may not making gross assumptions,
You're actually correct, you know.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
What I mean, grandparents and parents. I don't think I
know a police officer, but I know several. Yeah, it's
a very esteemed profession.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
It's changed and those people, the sort of modern, well fed,
clean cut kids. They don't tend to be corrupt. They're
not looking to steal twenty bucks for a start. They
don't feel poor. They might not be wealthy, but they
don't come from grinding poverty the way a lot of
people did. You know, people who were joining up in
(31:27):
the fifties, they remembered the depression, they remembered what it
was like to be hungry, and that made them pretty mean.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
But I guess with so many crimes happening today, we
don't have all of the resources to go back and
undo all of the potentially bad police.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Work of the past dead right. And I can recall this.
I worked in this a tail end of that era. Place.
You know, the hard drinkers. What you did if you
wanted to get stories, You went to the pub and
you put them drink for drink and sometimes I'd tell
you something and write it down on a beer coaster,
put it in your pocket.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
So you have, I guess a lot of hope seeing
the police work of today.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Look, it's technologically advanced. I mean, you know, it's like
flying aeroplanes. These days, there's a computer, this it for you,
and then the olden days you had to look at
the sky and working out for yourself. It's that different.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Well, as you said, it's harder to get away with
crime nowadays.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
I think that in a modern Western world, you know
a place like Australia, Canada, US, whatever, those sort of
countries that a serious crime like murder is almost impossible
to get away with telephones, credit cards, FPOs, cars, registration,
all that stuff. You're traceable, and as soon as they
suspect that you're a potential candidate, they can backtrack and
(32:43):
work out where you were and when you were there.
And then suddenly they go, oh, well she was here
when so and say was killed twenty five feet away.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
I mean, it's good news right now. It does make
me sad for the Margaret's and the Shawnas of the world.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's a terrible story, both of them, but poor little Shauna.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
It's actually a really sad story about what happened after
the murders because there was another child involved.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Oh, you're right. The last major story I did about this,
I went to England on other business and I went
to a regional town out of London called high Wickham
to find Sureness brother I'd arranged to go and see. Well,
by the time I got there, he was dead. But
you know, in the intervening weeks when I decided to
do this, he had essentially drunk himself to death and
(33:29):
perhaps even suicided justin Tap was older than short, so
I think he was thoughteen when the death happened. He
had an English passport, I think his dad might have
in English, and he used that to get back to
England and work there. And I went and found the
woman that he'd been living with at one point. She
(33:49):
was very nice and she picked me up from the
station and we out of long talk and she told
me about his sad life. She said he came in
and he played cricket and the local team and everybody
liked him, but he just couldn't get away from the
nightmares and the demons. And he always blamed himself because
he had he been home that night, which he wasn't.
He was staying with his grandparents, it wouldn't have happened.
(34:10):
He thought that he would have saved them. And so
the next, you know, thirty years, he blamed himself and
eventually it killed him. He basically drank himself to death.
He might have suicided. They couldn't tell when they found
his body. It was so badly they're composed that they
couldn't really tell.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
So when we talk about the Tap murders, we talk
about Shawanna and Margaret, but really we should include Justin.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And oh yeah, there's that, and then the father of
the two children. I mean that poor man, innocent, nice,
harmless man whose life has just been wrecked. But it's
possible that there's some DNA sitting somewhere and one day
they'll nailor it's conceivable.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Thanks to Andrew Rule for assisting us to tell this story.
True Crime Conversations is a Muma Meer podcast hosted and
produced by me Jemma Bath. Our executive producer is Lift Proud.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week
with another True Crime Conversation
You're listening too. A Mother MEA podcast, Mother Mea acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waders. This podcast was
recorded on It's about eleven PM in the winter of
nineteen eighty four in a suburban street in Melbourne, and
Rosalind Bomford wakes with a start. She can hear what
(00:33):
sounds like a muffled scream coming from the neighbor's house.
She waits listening. Her dog growls, but then there's silence.
Surely she was mistaken. Across the street, another neighbor hears
a sound. Closer to midnight. The Tap family dog is howling.
They've never heard the little dog so frantic. The spaniel
(00:57):
belongs to shawna Tap. She's only nine. She lives in
the ordinary, single story home with her fourteen year old
brother Justin, and their mother, Margaret, a local nurse, a
single mum and a part time law student. Pretty soon
the night is quiet again. But what is discovered the
following day in the fern Tree Gully home is so horrible.
(01:18):
The season detective who discovers it can't help but weep
when he goes home that evening. A crime so harrowing
it should be among Australia's most infamous, but instead, all
these years later, it's obvious this case has fallen through
the cracks. I'm Jemma Bath and this is True Crime
(01:46):
Conversations Amoma mea podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes
by speaking to the people who know the most about them.
A warning. What happened to Shauna and Margaret tap on
a Tuesday night in August four decades ago is hard
to hear a crime so harrowing it should be one
that's etched into our bones. The killer surely strangled Margaret first.
(02:10):
It's inconceivable she would not have fought to save her
little girl. Shauna died the same way, except she was
raped first. Both the mother and daughter were found still
in their nightgowns in their beds. Their names Arena's familiar
as some of the most famous crimes of our generation,
and yet this happened in a regular Aussie home, to
a loving family at the foothills of the Dandenong Rangers.
(02:34):
To help us understand the crime, the coverage, and the
police investigation that went cold, we're joined by journalist, podcaster
and author of Life and Crimes Andrew Ruhl, who covered
the story when it first broke in the nineteen eighties.
In more recent stories covering the case, Andrew is adamant
reporters and police sometimes get it wrong, including him. Andrew
(02:58):
joins us. Now, Andrew, I want to start with, do
you remember the night or the day that the Margaret
and shawna Tap murders came through.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
This is the interesting thing. It was a relatively minor
I wasn't a minor murder. It was a double murder
of a mother and daughter. But it didn't achieve the
splash that it might have had circumstances been slightly different.
Looking back on it, I was amazed years later to
look back and see that it only generated something like
(03:35):
five news stories in newspapers. Five only do you mean.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
In that initial kind of breaking news stay.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
In that first year or whatever, you know when it happened, right, Yeah,
it wasn't massive news for days and weeks because there
were no developments. And also in those cases, usually the
police will wheel out the grieving relatives who make appeals
and there's you know, heartbroken people pictures. The family of
Margaret Tap, for better or worse, were obviously greed stricken, heartbroken.
(04:04):
They are also shocked, and they are also religious people,
very respectable, and they were sort of scandalized. Apart from
all the rest of the stuff, they were scandalized about
her lifestyle, which she'd had a lot of different blogs
to visit her and so on, and so they didn't
really want to drag it all through the media, and
so they did no media and it died to death.
(04:26):
And that story, I'm ashamed to say that the media
of which I was a part really didn't get teeth
into it for years. And the biggest story ever written
was on the twentieth anniversary of the murders. I went
back to it and said, I'm going to do this
properly now, and I did it twenty years later.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
For those that haven't heard the story, because as you've said,
it's not a really well known case, let's talk about
some of the details. Firstly, Fern Tree Gully, I mean,
I've never heard of it. What's that area of Melbourne, like.
Speaker 2 (04:55):
Outer of eastern suburbs, probably now a bit like then
working class and up a fair way out out of east.
This is towards the dandiong Rangers.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
Family suburbia kind of.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
Oh, definitely family out of suburbia. You know, it's well out.
It's thirty odd case from the central city. They were
in Calvin Drive, which is just off Ferntree Gully Road,
a major busy road, and you could hear that traffic
from their house. Their house is number thirteen, so it
was only six houses off the big road. It was
a rented house which she'd taken possession of through an
(05:29):
affair she had with the doctor who bought it for her,
which is relevant because his widow, the doctor's widow, was
one of the suspects for the murder wrongly in my view,
a ridiculous suspect, but the police were pretty keen on
her for a while and thought she'd had Margaret knocked
off by a murdering pedophile, which would strike me as
a fairly long shot that a doctor's widow would employ
(05:52):
a hipman who was also an active pedophile who was
sexually assault the child. Shawna Well kind of.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
Gives you an idea of what the police were working with,
which is not a lot.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Not a lot, and the police don't always get it right.
In the eighties in Melbourne homicide Squad had patchy results,
and in the seventies with several murders that didn't get
investigated properly in my view, for various reasons. One is
they were busy doing other things, and of course in
those days they didn't have all the things that we
have now to find people. These days, you go out
(06:24):
and say, where's the cameras on them highway, where's the
cameras at the seven to eleven, where's the cameras next door?
Where's the credit card stuff? And all that registration plate recognition.
None of that existed. So if somebody got away with
murder in nine to eighty four or before, if they
shut up about it, they had a big chance of
getting away with it for good.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
From your recollection, what happened to Margaret and shaunatap late
on the.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Night of August seventh, So the Los Angeles Olympics are
on at this stage, someone a male person obviously, has
entered the house without forcing anything. This would suggest there
was somebody that might have had some knowledge of the place,
or that they knew possibly, but those who knew them
well knew that the back door didn't lock properly. It
(07:12):
was faulty, and you could walk in the back door
quite easily, and that would have been known to a
few people. Next day, the little girl next door usually
walked to school with Shauna, and Shawna was nine years old.
She looked up no sign, as Shauna, the blinds are
still drawn, the newspaper is still on the porch. The
(07:32):
newspapers delivered, it hadn't been picked up, and she wondered,
what's happening. So she walked to school by herself. Later
that afternoon, a man who knew Margaret, a nice fellow carpenter,
armless guy. He came around to see her to see
if she wanted to go to the opera with him,
and knock, knock, knock, no sign. Her brother in law
(07:55):
is another one who turned up and saw the paper,
saw the lockdoor, no sign. One of those two guys, Jim,
the carpenter, the friend of the opera guy. He goes
in the back door and finds the crime scene. He
finds both of them in beds with the covers pulled
up to their necks as if it's done by somebody
(08:16):
covering up the crime, the psychology of it, and both
of them had been strangled with something. In the case
of Shawna, the nine year old girl, there was seamen
found on her night dress, which would suggest a sort
of a sexual motive. So this wasn't a burglary gone wrong.
This wasn't a hit on Margaret performed by a hitman.
(08:36):
This was a weird sexual murder. Perhaps somebody has known
to them that had done something bad with Shauna, and
then Margaret realized or yelled, or you know, the little
girl yelled, and maybe then the perpetrator killed both the
cover up. This is what it looks like to me.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
I know you've spoken to one of the detectives that
found that scene and he was pretty shaken up by it,
wasn't he.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
I mean, there's detectives, many of them are married with kids.
It does shake them up when they see dead kids.
That really wears them. The problem with this whole case,
and there's no use sugar coating it, is that from
the start the police wasn't a case of not having suspects.
They had too many, and all about equal height. So okay,
let's look at Margaret. Who's she know, her ex husband
(09:19):
that she divorced five years earlier. Get him in. He'll
be good. Well he's not, he's harmless, alibi, not a problem.
Then the Margaret's sister's boyfriend, he was sort of brother
in law. He'd come around there. They'd have to clear him.
Then the alleg's boyfriend, the guy that came around to
take her to the opera, But he was a harmless
guy and nice guy. These three they clear rapidly. Then
(09:40):
there's Margaret's brother, who's a strange cat. Lindsey. I talked
to him quite a lot, and he worked at the
local council with a lot of rough guys, truck drivers
and sort of rough blugs. Some of them might had
a bit of form for crimes. One of them drove
a really hot Falcon newt red with mags. Such a
vehicle was seen in that street at some point that week.
(10:04):
Some of those guys had helped move furniture into the
house as a favor to the brother, so you had that.
Then Margaret, she was a nurse at a local hospital
in the Hills. She was very friendly with a lot
of different doctors. She'd had affairs with seven of them,
including a leading an ethetist.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
There were all of those, so seven more suspects.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Well potentially. And then she was a nurse, but she
was doing law at Monash University because she wanted to
become a medico legal. She was bright, she was smart.
She clearly had an enormously warm and engaging personality because
men just fell for her one after the other. She
was clearly an intriguing person with a force field of charisma.
(10:47):
You know, she'd met a guy at UNI that used
to come over and see her. And then she was
having truck driving lessons from a bloke who had a truck,
who was giving a lessons driving the truck. And so
there's you know, ten eleven, twelve suspects right there, let
alone anyone those guys knew what about that guy's friend,
what about that guy's brother. And in the end it
(11:09):
sort of collapsed under the way to all these potential
suspects that I don't believe were cleared properly back then
and only half heartedly cleared later because Margaret's brother, Lindsay,
assured me that he hadn't been cleared by DNA samples
until twenty years later, a big gap he himself. Now
he had to be regarded as a suspect.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
Because they had DNA from the scene, They had DNA
from this, they had semen, they had fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
They did not have finger or footprints. They had a footprint.
The one clue no one's ever been able to explain
it who it is, if it's innocent, was the footprint
of a Volley sanchu. Now you may not remember them,
but when I was young, everybody had Volly sancho's that
are Rippley sold.
Speaker 1 (11:51):
Now they're back again, they're back, pleased to know.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
And you know everyone more than then. They wore them
with jeans. And it was a thing, and it was
a certain size, and it had left a mark on
a clean floor because it had been recently used on it.
Probably they think on an onto car tennis court, you know,
the red dust tennis courts. And I were never able
to work out whose it was, and it would strike
(12:14):
you as a very intriguing clue. I have to say.
Among the other clues we haven't been through. Down the
road was a kid that all the neighbors said, this
kid's win, he's a teenager, right them down on his
bike and make filthy comments to women working in the garden.
I went and found this guy as an adult, very
strange cat, but he knew exactly where the grave was.
(12:35):
Explained to me how to go to their graves to Margaret,
and he said, yeah, you're going there, and then you
walk about fifty minutes in your turn left at a
black grave and it's a shiny one. He knew it precisely.
Just down the road, I think next to his house
was a house full of pretty rough people. One of
them had some form for badness and madness. His sister
lived at a caravan out the back of the house.
(12:58):
That guy did jail for rape on a separate case.
So our pool of potential suspects is what thirteen and
fourteen and fifteen, But.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
That shouldn't matter, doesn't a police investigation.
Speaker 2 (13:07):
It's interrogated that I found those guys. I found those
brothers from that house. They were all rough heads. Obviously
they can't all be guilty or none of them are guilty, right,
And I spoke to them. They said, yeah, the couples
should have come and say ah's he said, I was
working night shift. I was a perfect candidate. Why didn't
they come and talk to me and clear mate? Why
didn't they clear my brother? Yeah? They reckoned. The police
just didn't do their job properly, so it fell through cracks.
(13:33):
Another potential thing is, you know, Shauna was a Brownie,
the junior girl gods. We now know looking back on it,
that girl gods, brownies, cubs, scouts were full of pedophiles, which,
looking back, with the wisdom and mindsight, you think that
would have to be an interesting connection. Having gone through
all these things, I wrote a big story about it
(13:53):
twenty years later and since then. Some years ago now
I was approached by a young man said he was
a friend of the estranged children of a local doctor
from up there. This doctor was a GP who lived
in the dandinongs, so Danny Loong Rangers. I've got pleased
hills with trees and birds and flowers and pedophile doctors.
(14:15):
This doctor was popular, He was well known. He was
well liked by some people, not by others. He had
three kids of his own. Turned out he was a
sexual deviate of the darkest dye. Turns out that he
molested a lot of kids, including his own, and including patients.
So this is an interesting figure because he was very
(14:37):
well known up there as a GP. He would go
regularly to that hospital where Margaret worked. He wasn't one
of the hospital doctors, but he would go there to
treat you know, somebody's granny or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1 (14:49):
So it's another potential call totally.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
And he was a sexual predator, and he was a
good looking athletic tennis playing fellaw.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Right, and he's never been investigated for this crime.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
Well, that's a good question. When I was told about
this fellow only a few years ago. Now they nailed
one pedophile incident to him, obviously it'll be one of many.
But and he got struck off as a doctor. His
wife left him, his kids hated him, and he moved
up to a riverside town on the Murray River where
a lot of people go to retire and play golf.
(15:21):
That's where he's gone. And not long ago, a couple
of years ago, I went up there and sat off
his house and watching Walky's little dog down the street.
And everybody locally knows who he is in the background,
and they all watch him, all the parents. If he
ever steps out of line, he'll end up in the Murray.
That guy is intriguing because he played tennis with a
(15:42):
group of other men, one of whom I know. One
of them was the father of a girl that was
molested by this doctor, and he used to play at
a little tennis caught up there Fernie Creek and it
had an onto car court, you know, the red dust stuff.
I'm told that his feet were about the right size
for the shoes. Now, whether that's just a lot of coincidences,
(16:06):
I don't know. It may well be, but he's a
doctor that should easily have known Margaret. He played tennis
e will volley sanshoes. He was a sexual predator. He
was a sexual predator with a lot to lose and
later lost it. He was a big, strong, sort of
athletic guy, be quite capable of strangling mother and daughter there.
(16:27):
He is living in a country town in New South
Wales on the just on that side of the river.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
You're listening to true crime conversations with me, Jimmy Bath.
I'm speaking with Andrew Ruhle about the murder of Shawna
and Margaret. Tap up next, we discover why this unsolved
case didn't get the coverage it deserved. It's interesting because
(16:58):
hearing that obviously there's a lot of alarm bells there,
but then there's another really credible suspect that you write
about a lot, which was Margaret's dad's friend, the ex
policeman who we haven't even.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
I haven't because there's number what don't we can talk
about him? He died. I went knocked on his door
twenty years ago to find he was on a cruise somewhere.
He was an amateur door but he used to paint.
He painted a picture after Margaret and Shawna were murdered
of Shauna beside a campfire, and it ended up with
(17:30):
uncle Lindsey, with Shauna's uncle. He sent me a photograph
of it, and I was very intrigued by they saying
Cook he was a bit of a predatory guy. That
doesn't make him a killer and a pedophile. I have
to say he was an old copper that he'd known
the family for years. They were sort of friends. I
reckon he was in the Masonic lodge with Margaret's father.
(17:53):
I reckon there's a bit of a bond there, which
might be one of the reasons the case didn't get
publicized much. The police force in those days. There are
a lot of that Masons versus Catholics very big in
the police force until recent times, and those sort of
things would apply that if they said, oh, he's a
brother and he does on this publicized it's embarrassing. That
might well happen. So that fellow Anne Cook. He'd known
(18:16):
Margaret when she was a young runaway. She'd run away
from home at sixteen, and he'd gone to Saint Kildraa
somewhere and picked her up and brought her home. But
he used to visit and she used to complain to
her sister, so that bloody and Cook's coming around here.
Da da da da da. And he was allowed back
into the crime scene. He said to retrieve a book
or books or letters or something, and the coppers let
(18:39):
him in because he was either still a serving copper
or just out of the job. Now that puts him
at the crime scene. That means he can get his
fingerprints there legitimately, which covers him if his prince are
found back. I think so, But very hard to get
the sense out of the police later, because I think
there were a lot of gaps. They had different waves
(19:00):
of DNA test over twenty years, and they didn't clear
everybody in the first instance. When DNA came in, they
cleared you know, a short listen, and they cleared a
few more, and then a few more. And if if
these guys were too far away or too hard to find,
I think they slipped through the net for a long time.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
Would you give people a little bit of an idea
of the developments that did happen. They did actually charge
someone with the murders in two thousand and eight. Tell
us about that.
Speaker 2 (19:25):
Well, there's front page news.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
Finally makes sense.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It was leaked by a friendly homicide squad detective to
a colleague of mine. You know, big breakthrough. We've got him.
He's a boats in jail at Sale, which is a
regional city in Victoria. We've had a match with DNA.
It's him and front page news. Great crime solved. And
then there's a photograph of Margaret's poor ole father holding
(19:50):
a photograph of Margaret and a little girl and wrong.
Within days, turns out that he's been a balls up
in the laboratory. They'd spatted DNA around the room and
had fallen on the microscope and it wasn't him at all.
He gave no comment interview, which made the place pretty
keen on him. But when his lawyer pointed out that
(20:10):
his client was in Darwin at the time, provably or somewhere,
it all fell apart and they realized it was a
screw up at the lab not the only screw up.
They've had the lab either, it has happened before.
Speaker 1 (20:22):
It just feels like with this police investigation, there was holes,
but then there was these big bungles that happened.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Oh yeah, tell me a better. Homicide squads are interesting.
They're regarded as an elite squad, but they're regarded as
sort of corruption free because there'sn't a lot of opportunity. Really,
those would be good detectives doing their best, and most
of them are or were. But you have to realize
that homicide scott is mostly a case of turning up
at an address where somebody's rung in and said two
(20:51):
dead on the floor, and they go in and there's
you know, mumster skilled dab with a breadknife and says,
I'm sorry, I couldn't take it anymore. Take me to jail.
You know, it's that easy. Most homicides, eight out of
ten of them, are like that. Their clean up rates
are artificially inflated by those walk up starts. It's not
like catching arm robbers who run away from you and
(21:11):
are good crooks. You're catching basically mostly people that have
been involved in a once in a lifetime domestic incident
where a murders b and then says, you got me GV.
Speaker 1 (21:22):
Can we compare it, because when you look at this
story on its own, it feels kind of mind blowing,
all of the mistakes. Let's compare it to one of
the stories that you cover in your latest book, which
is the Easy Street Street which most people will know about.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Easy Street correctly has become one of the most celebrated
unsolved cases in Australia. I guess there's others that compare
in scope. It's two young women with a little child
in the house who wasn't hurt. The two suits. One
was Suzanne, one was Susan, our friends. They were living
together in a rented housing Easy Street, Collingwood in Melbourne
(21:58):
in a suburbs nineteen seventy seven, very hot summer. They're
found by a neighbor who'd found their dog wandering around
and went through the back gate in the back door
and walked down the hall and found a total scene
of chaos and blood everywhere. Both of them stabbed to
death multiple times. And in the middle bedroom. There were
two bedrooms and a long, thin terrace house. So one
(22:21):
is dead in the front room. Then there's a middle
room with a little boy dehydrated, very thirsty, very sad
eighteen month old baby Greg in his cot and then
then the other young woman is dead in the other bedroom,
stabbed in a frenzy by an unknown assailant. Similar problem.
The police when they looked into it, they said, oh god,
(22:41):
you know, says An Armstrong was going out with this
sheer from Euroa and his brothers knows them, and then
there's this one. They backtrack and find all these different
people that had been the parties there whatever, and in
the end the police couldn't sort of work out who
was the best candidate, and they ended up with a
least to go to and no pretty keen on a
few of them. They were keen on Susan Armstrong's boyfriend,
(23:05):
but ultimately they got nowhere. It was a very patchy investigation.
Another generation of police were shocked when they pulled out
the easy Street file. It was a Manila a little
Manila folder with twenty four sheets of paper in it.
I mean, school essays are longer than that, you know.
It was just rubbish and they had bugger roll. They
just didn't get anywhere. And again they had too many
(23:28):
potential candidates. One guy climbed through a window after the
murders gone in and left a note for them on
a cigarette packet, you know, ring me on this number.
The police track him down and said what's with you,
and he said, well, I've been there before. I knew
I had to open the window, but I didn't go
that way towards the bedrooms. And he was one of
two people that did that. The boyfriend, the sheerer guy,
(23:49):
had also walked in the back door and called out
no answer, so he didn't being a well mannered country boy,
he did not walk up into the house. He just
called that from the kitchen. So two different men that
are known have been in that house after the murders.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Do you think that particular case did get more attention
from police in the end because it was getting more
attention from us, from the public, from the media.
Speaker 2 (24:13):
Big media story. Easy Street. There's something about the name
that just works. It's the Beaumont children an Easy Street
have always been. They just caught the imagination, they caught
the headlines, and people never forgot them. You know. The
Margaret tap case actually is just as awful in every way,
but never caught attention in the same way. And that's
(24:35):
why I concentrated on it years later to sort of
remedy that.
Speaker 1 (24:38):
And what do you put that down to?
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Well, is nowhere to go. See, the thing is about
day to day reporting. You need a development of some sort,
or you need somebody saying tomorrow we're going to have
Margaret's sister, and next day we're going to have a grandma,
and next day we're going to you know, we're going
to have something. So everything just split it out. It
was awful and I feel bad that that's what happened.
But it wasn't a media conspiracy. It wasn't a police conspiracy.
(25:03):
To some extent, it was the family. If the family
had been really keen to pursue it, they would have
fed the media. They weren't going to do that.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
I think it also comes down to what people want
to read as well.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
It does. And you know what, there's not an appetite
for child's sex stories. I have to say, they're so
awful abhorrent that nobody approaches them the way we approach
when a gangster gets shot, happy days, it's wonderful. As
long as no one innocent gets hurt, we're all happy.
No one thinks it's a great story to do something
about a dead child that's been sexually assaulted, it's just
(25:37):
too awful to contemplate.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
When you did pick up the story twenty years after
the fact and started writing about it again, did you
find that people were interested they wanted to hear more.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
Well, they really. If you write a story graphically enough
and with some sort of style and timing and effect,
that people will read it for sure. But it wasn't
until I did it for Good Weekend magazine. It was
the twentieth anniversary of Good Weekend Magazine and it was
the twentieth anniversary of the Tap murder, so that was
the perfect crime story to put in that mag and
(26:19):
I did it as a big, long piece. It's probably
five thousand words and read, examining a case that most
people couldn't remember or had never heard of. No one
in Sydney would have heard of it at all before that.
Speaker 1 (26:31):
I don't think many people in Australia might.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Have heard of it. Oh true, But I'm just saying, yeah,
I mean some Melbourne people. I mean I certainly remembered
it happening, but I was a crime reporter, so naturally
I should remember. But it's only become more notorious in
the last twenty years, when we'd focused on it a bit.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Do you think that that crime could ever be solved
now that we are forty years down the track.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
It depends on whether they have usable DNA. I don't
know if they have or not. And if they have,
who knows. One day somebody somewhere might fall into the net.
Speaker 1 (27:03):
I want to ask you more generally, because you've written
about a lot of crime in your career, what has
it taught you about people looking into the worst of society.
Speaker 2 (27:14):
Nature and nurture both apply. But most of the most
awful violent killers have been to a large extent, created
by what happened to them as kids. And this is
not to excuse anyone, but I've just realized in the
last decade or so that I keep saying these patterns emerge.
(27:34):
The family caught bomber up here. Leonard the mad fireman,
killed people everywhere, shot them, he bombed them, he burnt
places down, He did terrible things, very angry man. And
when you go back and look at that story, you
go now, Leonard was all right until his mom died
when he was ten, and then he ends up in
that notorious boy's home where kids were abused. And so
(27:57):
this smiling little kid pictured in grade six, by the
time he's fourteen, he's sullen and vengeful and weird. Were
why because he went to that place and he will
have been raped undoubtedly that place. Christoph Dale Flannery, the
big time hit man, was disappeared in Sydney, murdered by
gangster's prolific killer known as Renter Kill. Very violent man
(28:21):
was sent to a boy's home in Victoria called Morning Star,
run by the Franciscan monks. His cousin told me that
he used to cry when he talked about what had
happened to him at the boy's home. Now, this is
true of so many of these guys that if you
go back through it, you find out that they were exposed.
(28:41):
I can do this for an hour. I can tell
you examples of it, and I won't bore you with it.
But trust me, so many of them, including that you know,
the Russell Street bombs in Melbourne, the old guy Stan Taylor,
who was the mentor to those young bucks. He had
been put in a Salvation Army boy when he was
nine for good reason. His own life would have been awful.
(29:02):
His father was a brute. He'd been brutalized as a youngster,
an intelligent youngster, brutalized and then always trying to get
back at the world in some way, and it turns
them into very, very violent, evil people. And I think
that's something I've realized more and more and more that
you see that pattern repeated often.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
What about the criminal justice system, because I think doing
this podcast, obviously there are so many police officers out
there doing the right thing, but then there are certain
cases like the one we've been talking about today, where
things haven't been done correctly, people have potentially fallen through
gaps or there's corruption. What have you learned from that
or do you feel a bit jaded?
Speaker 2 (29:44):
Yeah, Look, I think police forces have probably improved in
many ways. I think they're more honest now, please, Because
it used to be a step away from poverty for
working class boys. If you're big and strong and were
smart enough to get into the police source. You had
to have a certain level of proficiency. It was a
way to get away from swinging a pick or you know,
(30:06):
working on the tramways. It became a very corrupt brotherhood
for that reason that these were poor people on the
make they were battling to pay off a house, battling
to pay off a car, and the way they could
do that on their relatively poor wages was to take
money from sp bookies and from publicans and whatever else.
(30:26):
And that's what made police force, particularly in New South
Wales and Queensland but everywhere. That's what fostered that low
hum of corruption that bloomed magnificently in Sydney. I have
to say where it went right to the top. These days,
police work I think is more of a middle class
aspirational thing, and that you know, you may well know
(30:48):
people that are police officers. I'm getting your parents may
not have had a while guest, you know, back in
the day, or your grandparents. I may not making gross assumptions,
You're actually correct, you know.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
What I mean, grandparents and parents. I don't think I
know a police officer, but I know several. Yeah, it's
a very esteemed profession.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
It's changed and those people, the sort of modern, well fed,
clean cut kids. They don't tend to be corrupt. They're
not looking to steal twenty bucks for a start. They
don't feel poor. They might not be wealthy, but they
don't come from grinding poverty the way a lot of
people did. You know, people who were joining up in
(31:27):
the fifties, they remembered the depression, they remembered what it
was like to be hungry, and that made them pretty mean.
Speaker 1 (31:33):
But I guess with so many crimes happening today, we
don't have all of the resources to go back and
undo all of the potentially bad police.
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Work of the past dead right. And I can recall this.
I worked in this a tail end of that era. Place.
You know, the hard drinkers. What you did if you
wanted to get stories, You went to the pub and
you put them drink for drink and sometimes I'd tell
you something and write it down on a beer coaster,
put it in your pocket.
Speaker 1 (31:59):
So you have, I guess a lot of hope seeing
the police work of today.
Speaker 2 (32:03):
Look, it's technologically advanced. I mean, you know, it's like
flying aeroplanes. These days, there's a computer, this it for you,
and then the olden days you had to look at
the sky and working out for yourself. It's that different.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Well, as you said, it's harder to get away with
crime nowadays.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
I think that in a modern Western world, you know
a place like Australia, Canada, US, whatever, those sort of
countries that a serious crime like murder is almost impossible
to get away with telephones, credit cards, FPOs, cars, registration,
all that stuff. You're traceable, and as soon as they
suspect that you're a potential candidate, they can backtrack and
(32:43):
work out where you were and when you were there.
And then suddenly they go, oh, well she was here
when so and say was killed twenty five feet away.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
I mean, it's good news right now. It does make
me sad for the Margaret's and the Shawnas of the world.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
It's a terrible story, both of them, but poor little Shauna.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
It's actually a really sad story about what happened after
the murders because there was another child involved.
Speaker 2 (33:06):
Oh, you're right. The last major story I did about this,
I went to England on other business and I went
to a regional town out of London called high Wickham
to find Sureness brother I'd arranged to go and see. Well,
by the time I got there, he was dead. But
you know, in the intervening weeks when I decided to
do this, he had essentially drunk himself to death and
(33:29):
perhaps even suicided justin Tap was older than short, so
I think he was thoughteen when the death happened. He
had an English passport, I think his dad might have
in English, and he used that to get back to
England and work there. And I went and found the
woman that he'd been living with at one point. She
(33:49):
was very nice and she picked me up from the
station and we out of long talk and she told
me about his sad life. She said he came in
and he played cricket and the local team and everybody
liked him, but he just couldn't get away from the
nightmares and the demons. And he always blamed himself because
he had he been home that night, which he wasn't.
He was staying with his grandparents, it wouldn't have happened.
(34:10):
He thought that he would have saved them. And so
the next, you know, thirty years, he blamed himself and
eventually it killed him. He basically drank himself to death.
He might have suicided. They couldn't tell when they found
his body. It was so badly they're composed that they
couldn't really tell.
Speaker 1 (34:26):
So when we talk about the Tap murders, we talk
about Shawanna and Margaret, but really we should include Justin.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
And oh yeah, there's that, and then the father of
the two children. I mean that poor man, innocent, nice,
harmless man whose life has just been wrecked. But it's
possible that there's some DNA sitting somewhere and one day
they'll nailor it's conceivable.
Speaker 1 (34:54):
Thanks to Andrew Rule for assisting us to tell this story.
True Crime Conversations is a Muma Meer podcast hosted and
produced by me Jemma Bath. Our executive producer is Lift Proud.
Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week
with another True Crime Conversation
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