The Shepparton Tragedy - 1966 - by Alan Sharpe

The new generation who emerged in the 1960s from the inhibited 1950s felt assured of the future, dismissing the past. Triggered by the ˜pill', introduced at the start of the decade, this generation chose its own moral code to the accompaniment of the Beatles and the new rock sound, dumbfounding an older generation. The nation was sharpening its identity, fuelled by prosperity and population growth, which manifested itself in new homes and burgeoning suburbs.

While the contours of the cities underwent dramatic change, it was also boom time for the country towns. One such place was Shepparton on the fertile Goulburn Valley plains, 172 kilometres north of Melbourne. Enriched by its bountiful orchards, canneries and farms, the town seized upon each new social distraction ”the drive-in theatre, the bowling alley. New white-tablecloth restaurants and intimate coffee lounges challenged the ˜fifties milk bars, and supermarkets competed with the friendly store. Television was ten years old and few homes were without a set.

Even the perennial Saturday night dance was spruced up by the opening of Shepparton's new Civic Centre, which made the town's 15,000 inhabitants just a little proud of living there.

The musical show drawing crowds to the Civic Centre on Thursday, 10 February 1966 was called The Mod Spectacular. Garry Heywood, 18, and his 16-year-old girlfriend, Gail, decided not to go that night and when Garry dropped her at her house after work she thought he was off home for an early night. He did go home but later he drove his shiny FJ Holden to the Civic Centre.

Not far away Fred Madill was driving his daughters Abina, 16, and her younger sister, Roslyn, to the concert, picking up their girlfriends, Jan and Rae, on the way. Unable to park near the Centre, he dropped the four girls off, knowing Abina's current boyfriend, Ian Urquhart, a motor mechanic, was working back that night. He would bring them home after the show.

Roslyn and Rae entered the Centre but Abina and Jan walked on to the bowling alley, where Abina expected to meet some of the boys from work. Garry's dark green Holden was already there with four boys inside. He drove down behind the lake where the boys produced cans of lager and vodka and orange for the girls.

A half-hour or so later they were back at the Civic Centre and Garry and one of the boys entered the hall. Abina and Jan went for a stroll around the block with the other two boys. At 10.30 pm Garry was back in the car. Jan left the group to meet her boyfriend and Garry asked the remaining two boys to leave the car so he could drive Abina back to the lake. He promised faithfully he would be back to pick them up.

He returned within half an hour but somehow missed the two boys. When the concert ended, shortly before 11.30 pm, a girl who knew Garry saw him drive past near the Centre. She wasn't sure if anyone else was with him in the car.

Ian Urquhart's mother died when he was five and he was brought up on an orchard just outside Shepparton by his strict Scottish father and his older sisters. His aptitude for mechanics earned him an apprenticeship with the local Ford dealer and he had recently moved into lodgings in the town.

Abina Madill was 18-year-old Ian's first proper girlfriend. On this Thursday night he was anxious to be on time to pick her up when the concert at the Civic Centre ended just before 11.30 pm.

After freshening up, he joined some of his mates at the Taverna Coffee Lounge. Among them was Peter Hazelman, who drove Ian to the Civic Centre in his Austin A90 motor car. Outside the concert hall Ian spotted Abina's sister Roslyn who told him Abina was with Garry Heywood. Ian knew Garry worked at the panel beaters where Abina was employed as a clerk and he was angry. The two boys drove Roslyn home. Abina was not back yet. The boys drove around town looking out for Garry Heywood's green Holden without success. They returned to Abina's house and waited outside.

Fred Madill was fast asleep when his wife, who had been visiting friends, arrived home to tell him Abina was not in her room. In the early hours of Friday morning Fred Madill entered the police station. It was 2 am when he got back and the two boys, Ian and Peter, were still wailing outside his house in the Austin.

Garry Heywood's father, Charlie, now joined Fred Madill in his car and together they drove around checking likely places the couple might be. Only the police appeared untroubled by the events of the evening, convinced the youngsters had simply run off together.

Just before dawn a policeman came across Garry's green FJ Holden down by the lake. The windows were down and the keys were missing. The car was badly parked, as if the driver had been in a hurry. A despondent Charlie Heywood knew at once his son, who nurtured the car, would never have left it parked that way.

On Saturday morning a man cycling across a bridge, some 20 kilometres from Shepparton, thought he saw a woman's white handbag lying at the bottom of the creek. Among the contents, including a small amount of cash was Abina Madill's name and the Maxwell Street address. When news of the discovery broke, the smiles and winks faded.

Members of the fingerprint branch went over the green Holden, now locked in the police garage. There were two unidentified prints on top of the driver's door.

A search and rescue team arrived from Melbourne and dozens of local volunteers joined in the search for the missing couple. Although some still believed the teenagers had run off together, most of them knew they were searching for bodies.

On the Monday, news of the missing pair appeared in the Melbourne newspapers. That day several Shepparton teenagers were called, one by one, to the CIB for questioning. It was more like a grilling and they came away badly shaken. Ian Urquhart, the man with a motive, was given a particularly hard lime by the detectives.

Meanwhile the families of the missing pair clung to the hope they were alive, as reports of sightings came in from various parts of the country. To add to the pain, Garry Heywood's father was brought in for intensive questioning by Melbourne homicide detectives who had arrived in town. Some of them believed Garry might have murdered Abina and his father was concealing him.

Two 17-year--old boys arrived by train at Murchison East, 37 kilometres from Shepparton, on a weekend shooting trip from Melbourne. The pair trudged down the gravel road leading from the railway station to the river then cut across a paddock and scaled a fence to get into the forest where they hoped to spot rabbits or foxes.

They were aware of a peculiar smell and assumed it was a dead animal. On their return, an hour later, they discovered the real cause. It was the blackened, badly decomposed body of a young girl. Flies buzzed around the body in the shimmering heat as the boys stood aghast. The skull had been shattered and the body, partly clothed, was nude from the waist down. By mid-afternoon sleepy Murchison East was buzzing with police. The body of a young male, found in the long grass 200 metres from the girl, was not as decomposed because it lay in the shade of the gum trees. There was a bullet hole in the boys left temple.

Part of Abina Madill's clothing was found, neatly folded, with one white shoe on top and the other beside. Someone, either Abina herself or her killer, was tidy. Nearby were her stockings tied in a loop to bind one of the victims' arms or legs.

A huge task lay ahead for the police. Hundreds of itinerant fruit pickers were employed in and around Shepparton and any one of them might be responsible.

Widespread gloom settled over the town. Parents drove their children everywhere, rumour and innuendo were rife and anyone remotely involved with the dead teenagers received questioning glances.

Even Garry Heywood's shy girlfriend, Gail, was hauled up to the police station several times for questioning. Most out-of-town detectives were convinced Ian I Urquhart was involved with the murders, with Peter Hazelman as his accomplice.

The burial of the murdered teenagers took place on 4 March, three weeks after their disappearance. A Catholic service was held for the Heywood family and a Presbyterian service was held at Scots Church for the Madills.

In a scene which might have been taken from a movie, Ian Urquhart and his sister, Hannah, entered Scots Church and stood at the back during the service for Abina. Soon there were accusing over-the-shoulder glances and dark whispers behind hands, but Ian was too absorbed by grief to notice.

The police were clinging to three clues. The teenagers had been shot dead with a .22 Mossberg rifle which eventually led to a nationwide check-up of owners. There was a missing blue car rug which Garry always kept folded on the back seat of his car. Finally, there were the two fingerprints on the top of the driver's door.

At first, the strongest lead appeared to be the rifle. The police got nowhere with the rug even though a similar one was put on display in the window of one of the towns major stores. The fingerprints were kept secret and filed away.

Seven weeks, and more than a thousand interviews later, the police were nowhere. Many believed the killer was one of the fruit pickers while others, along with some of the detectives, swore Ian Urquhart was guilty. The questioning of both Ian and Peter Hazelman had stopped and it was mid-year before police assured the embittered Urquhart family that he was in the clear. It made little difference to some people and Ian knew it was time to leave his home town for good. His friend, Peter Hazelman, more sensitive and less resilient, found work in Tasmania. He returned to live in Shepparton two years later, only to find people's attitude had scarcely changed.

Ian Urquhart worked on an oil rig in Western Australia, Australia for a time before moving on to Singapore. It was here, almost six years to the day after the murders, that he was killed in a car crash.

During the period the police were checking Mossberg rifle owners, a police constable called at Gawnes farm in Ardmona, just outside Shepparton. He wanted to question a man named Raymond Edmunds but was told that Edmunds, who had worked on the property as a share firmer, had moved on. Mr Gawnes remembered Ray Edmunds owned a .22 semi automatic Mossberg rifle and gave the policeman Edmund's forwarding address at Mayrung, New South Wales, Australia.

What brought the policeman to Gawnes farm in the first place was not recorded nor, it seems, was the Mayrung address ever followed through.

Had the policeman confronted Ray Edmunds at that time he would have found a fairly tall, lean, suntanned man with light sandy hair and hazel eyes. A typical young rural worker, with large hands and powerful arms, Edmunds' manner was amiable but distant and somehow at odds with his 22 years. Ray Edmunds had worked as a share farmer around Victoria accompanied by his wife, Lesley who was two years younger. At the time they moved to Mayrung their daughter was two and their son almost one year old.

Life with Ray was no picnic for pretty, fair-haired Lesley. Most of the time he was indifferent to her and was quick give her a 'backhander' if she annoyed him. She was expected to help Ray with the milking and any other jobs around the farm, even when she became pregnant.

Ray played the trumpet at country hops and often used it as an excuse for his all-night absences. Later Lesley discovered he had been with other women. He was always sexually demanding and she never refused him but his increasingly aberrant excesses sometimes repelled her.

On occasions his violent rage erupted. He once beat a cow almost to death with an iron chain. There was also an occasion when he kicked and beat a dog to death. When their daughter was three, Lesley caught Ray molesting her. When she threatened to leave him he persuaded her to stay.

Ray Edmunds was an adopted child although he did not know this until he was in his teens. His stepfather, Harold, was a hard headed businessman who bought and sold farms and the family was constantly on the move. Harold lauded it over his frail and placid wife but the couple doted on their adopted son, who gave some meaning to their sterile relationship. Harold totally indulged Ray, creating a gap between the boy and other children. The colourless, withdrawn child made few friends and remained friendless in adult life.

In between selling homes, Ray's stepmother took him to stay with her mother in Preston, Melbourne. It was here, when he was barely 17, that he was seduced by a bisexual woman in her thirties. She encouraged Ray to watch while she and her girlfriend made love, after which she turned to the eager teenager who became a willing participant in some of her sexual 'experiments'.

Lesley was sixteen when she met and was attracted to the self-assured, sleek-haired Ray, in Yarrawonga in 1960. Before long she was made pregnant by him. Both sets of parents had misgivings and Ray himself was less than enthusiastic but they married a year later.

Ray Edmunds emerges as a sullen, insensitive and self-centred man who could be agreeable when it suited him. Women found themselves attracted to him, but he was unpopular with men. His wife hung on to the marriage for the sake of the children, and in the forlorn hope he might change. Lesley's situation finally became intolerable and she left him and went to her parents' place in Yarrawonga, eventually finding work in Melbourne. Four years went by before she saw her children again.

Ray advertised for a housekeeper in the Weekly Times. It was aNew South Walesered by Colleen Knight, a young, unmarried mother with two children. She got the job and soon became his bedmate and, after his divorce from Lesley, his second wife.

Now it was Ray's turn to walk out of a marriage. One day he told Colleen he was going fishing and would return to take the family for a picnic lunch. Instead he drove all the way to Melbourne in his new Ford station wagon and got a job as a conductor on the tramways. She didn't see him for three months.

The inquest into the murder of Abina Madill and Garry Hewood opened in June 1970, the four year delay caused by the hundreds of leads which the police painstakingly pursued. The coroner found the teenagers were murdered by a person or persons unknown in the early hours of 11 February l966. There was no new evidence, only a revival of the pain for their loved ones.

Colleen and Ray Edmunds were back together, after her brother-in-law spotted him in Melbourne, and the couple, with their five children, three of whom belonged to Lesley, moved into a house in the inner suburb of Richmond.

On the night of 26 July 1971 a 25-year-old married woman in suburban Donvale was startled when she saw a man with a stocking mask approaching her along the passageway of her home. Her three young children were in bed and her husband was out visiting friends. She screamed when she saw the man was carrying a long knife. He told her to keep quiet, that he didn't want to hurt her, as she backed into the kitchen.

He asked her for money but she told him there was none in the house. Then he told her to get undressed. She told him she had just had a baby and still had the stitches. He seemed to understand and produced a pair of stockings and said he would tie her hands and feet and would go. She slithered to the floor and he began touching her breasts. She screamed again and he suddenly fled.

The police found the footprints around the windows suggested the intruder had been watching the woman for some time before entering the house. The attempted rape was similar to one which had occurred in the same suburb 11 days earlier. There were more attacks by the serial rapist and a pattern soon emerged - the house surveillance, the absence of the male member of the family at the time and the presence of young children, theoretically making the woman more compliant to his demands.

In January 1975, in suburban Greensborough, another rape took place. The victim described her attacker as plump, with sandy coloured hair, probably in his late twenties. The man wore shorts and a blue singlet but no shoes. He also had a peculiar odour which she was unable to identify.

Six months later, in the same suburb, another victim was able to give a full description of the rapist, guessing at his weight and height and noting his hands were soft. He had entered the house on the one night of the week when her husband worked late and seemed to know when he was due back. The man must have watched the house for weeks.

In both cases fingerprints matched those taken at Donvale, providing the police with a name - the Donvale Rapist. When more women reported the man's peculiar smell, one newspaper editor was less respectful, referring to the rapist as 'Mr Stinky.'

In 1982 the Victorian Police fingerprint bureau in Melbourne decided to display photographs of five sets of fingerprints, associated with the state's most notorious unsolved crimes, on a large sheet of cardboard in their office. Among them were the two prints taken from Garry Heywood's Holden car door 16 years earlier.

A sharp-eyed police sergeant sorting through the fingerprint file pulled out matching sets of prints taken at rape locations in Donvale, Greensborough and Chelsea Heights between 1971 and 1977. There was something familiar about them. With mounting excitement he checked the 'top five' board. The Donvale Rapist and the murderer of the Shepparton teenagers was one and the same.

A meeting was held in Shepparton between Melbourne homicide detectives and the local CIB. As a result two detectives were assigned to the re-opened case. The task ahead was big and their starting point was to re-interview several of the victims of the Donvale Rapist.

Of the 12 women interviewed, four remembered the distinct odour. Eight remembered the soft hands, shorts and singlet and the bare feet. They all remembered the butcher's knife. The women were young and the presence of children in the house had made them more co-operative. The man of the house was always absent. With the guidance of four of the victims, a sculptor created a likeness of the rapist's head.

In May 1983, after eight months of concentrated investigation by the two detectives, four suburban detectives were added to form a task force, occupying an office at the police academy at Mount Waverley. Two weeks earlier, in a house only ten minutes' walk away, the Donvale Rapist had struck again. This time the victim was 17 years old. The police estimated the man had committed at least 20 sexual assaults on woman.

On Saturday morning, 16 March 1985, the woman in charge of the electrical department at Waltons department store in Albury was standing by the cash register. She glanced out of the display windows and noticed a Ford station wagon parked outside. A thick-set man with greying sandy hair and a blue singlet was resting in the tilted front seat. She thought he had a rather tense expression. Without giving it a thought she turned away. Moments later she happened to glance out the window again and suddenly realised, to her surprise and amusement, that the man was masturbating.

It was close to lunch-time and business had slackened off. In minutes a grinning group of staff members concealed themselves to watch the man blatantly masturbate. It attracted the store manager's attention and he promptly rang the police.

Two police cars arrived in minutes and a constable tapped on the window of the station wagon. The man was startled when saw the uniform but meekly got into the police car and was driven to the station where he gave his address in Melbourne, admitting he had acted foolishly. It was all a matter of routine. Had he been picked up just across the border in Victoria, Australia he wouldn't have been fingerprinted but this was New South Wales, Australia and it was compulsory.

In July the previous year two Victorian detectives had arrived at the Central Fingerprint Bureau in Sydney and spent a week searching through the files. A senior detective working late at the bureau picked up a set of prints recently arrived from Albury and immediately recognised them as matching those the Victorian detectives had brought with them eight months ago. On the back of the form was the name Raymond Edmunds with a Melbourne address - Victoria Street, Mordialloc.

Suppressed excitement permeated the telephone call from Sydney to Melbourne. Following their initial jubilation the Victorian detectives, who had worked so diligently all those months, felt a sense of anticlimax. The rest, it seemed, was going to be too easy, although there was still much to be done.

When the detectives called at a factory in suburban Highett, they recognised him immediately they entered his foreman's office - the beer gut, the hair colouring, even the shorts and blue singlet. On the way to St Kilda police Station Edmunds was told they wished to speak to him in regard to the murder of a young couple in Shepparton in 1966. Wedged between two detectives Edmunds remained perfectly calm. Told he would be fingerprinted for comparison he showed no emotion.

At first Edmunds was evasive, calmly fielding questions, deliberately leaving out slices of his movements over the years, but as the mounting weight of evidence was presented to him he began to crack. Finally he broke down and through his tears said he would tell them the truth about everything if they allowed him to see a priest. In 1986 Raymond Edmunds was sentenced to life imprisonment.