SYDNEY (AFP) – A 65-year-old man has been arrested in Rome over the “horrific, frenzied” 1977 murder of two women in their home in Melbourne, Australian police said on Saturday.
The bodies of Suzanne Armstrong, 27, and Susan Bartlett, 28, were discovered at their house in Easey Street, Melbourne, on January 13, 1977, with multiple stab wounds.
Armstrong had been raped. Her then 16-month-old son was found unharmed in his cot.
The women had last been seen alive three days earlier. “It was an absolutely gruesome, horrific, frenzied homicide – multiple stabbings,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton told a news conference.
He described the 47-year-old crime, known as the Easey Street murders, as the state’s longest and most serious cold case.
The suspect, a dual Greek-Australian citizen, had been living in Greece where he was protected by the country’s statute of limitations, Patton said.
Police waited for him to leave the country, the chief commissioner added, and he was finally arrested on Thursday in the Italian capital’s Fiumicino airport under an Interpol red notice.
Australia will launch extradition procedures, he said.
Police had been helped by “technological advances” over the years, Patton said.
In 2017, they offered an AUD1 million (USD680,000) reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction, he said, after new information had come to light.
He declined to give more details of the investigation.
Speechless
A report in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, which police did not confirm, said police had decided to check the DNA of all 131 people named in the original police file.
The suspect was on that list and had agreed to undergo a DNA test but instead fled to Greece in 2017, the paper reported.
He was linked to the crime by the DNA of a close relative, it said.
According to The Age, the suspect had been stopped and searched on the night of the murders by local police who found a large knife on him – three days before the bodies were discovered.
It is “understood” that the man – then a teenager – was not interviewed about the killings at the time as police focused on other suspects, the paper said.
A detective senior sergeant running the investigation since 2015 broke the news of the suspect’s arrest to the victims’ families on Saturday morning, Patton said. The families were “emotional, speechless, overwhelmed, but appreciative that they hadn’t been forgotten”, he said.
“There is simply no expiry date on crimes that are as brutal as this. I think that is borne out here today.”
