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Robert Cairns

For nearly 40 years, Australian child killer Derek Ernest Percy  has been locked away in prisons in Victoria,  declared insane and largely forgotten.
Percy, 60, is one of the country's longest-serving prisoners. When he was jailed, he appeared unremarkable: a slight young man, clean-shaven with short hair.
Recent photographs show the ravages of a lifetime in prison. Today, Percy is a haunting figure with a white beard, unkempt hair and wild eyes.
The Age  newspaper described him as 'one man - so many faces of evil'.
Imprisoned for the murder of a 12-year-old girl in 1969, Percy is still considered too dangerous to be released. Now, police are investigating him again as new evidence links him to some of Australia's most notorious unsolved murders.
This includes the Wanda Beach  murders in Sydney in 1965 and the disappearance of the Beaumont children in Adelaide in 1966.
Victorian police investigations into these cold cases are under way. But one of the problems facing police - along  with the passage of time - is that Percy will admit nothing. He claims to have trouble remembering.
Prison guards describe Percy as clever - a man who enjoys playing chess and collecting stamps.  Despite not working since the 1960s, he is well off, having invested his savings while in prison. One prison officer told The Age: 'He's highly intelligent, but you could never get a handle on his real feelings. He's our Hannibal Lecter.'
Although Percy was declared criminally insane, many doubt this. 'There is no way he is mad,' a police source told The Age: 'He's intelligent, cunning and pure evil.'
The former naval rating was jailed for  the horrific murder of Yvonne Elizabeth Tuohy.   Tuohy was abducted on July 20, 1969, from a beach at Warneet,  southeast of Melbourne. She had been walking with an 11-year-old boy. Police found her body 10km away, at a place called Devon Meadows.  She was gagged and bound and her throat had been slit.
Over the years, memories of the crime faded. But a dramatic discovery recently brought Percy back into the spotlight.
Detectives working with Victoria's cold-case unit were re-examining suspects in old murders last year when, in the course of their inquiries, they  learned that Percy had been keeping a secret storage facility in South Melbourne. He was able to rent the facility because he still received a navy pension and  had evidently done well from his investments in gold. Along with the storage facility, he had  nearly A$200,000 (HK$1 million) in his bank account.
A search of the facility on July 20, 2007, unearthed a secret cache of material belonging to Percy. It included 35 boxes of files, clippings and handwritten diaries. The material was stored in tea chests and cardboard boxes. There were newspaper clippings on sex crimes, photos of children and a video with a rape theme. There were also handwritten stories about abduction and torture.
Police were astonished to discover that the material linked Percy to eight other unsolved murders in the 1960s - some of them Australia's most infamous.
The two most notorious cases are the Wanda Beach murders of Christine Sharrock  and Marianne Schmidt,  both aged 15,  in Sydney in January 1965, and the disappearance of the Beaumont children - Jane,  nine, Anna,  seven and Grant,  four - who vanished in Adelaide in January 1966.
Percy is also suspected of the murders of six-year-old Allen Redston  in Canberra in September 1966; three-year-old Simon Brook  in Glebe, Sydney, in May 1968; and seven-year-old Linda Stilwell,  who was taken from the foreshore of Melbourne's St Kilda  beach in August 1968.
Police have confirmed that Percy visited or had been living in all the cities where these children were murdered. He was in Adelaide when the Beaumont children disappeared. When Linda Stilwell disappeared he was stationed with the navy nearby. He had  lived 5km from where Simon Brook's body was discovered.
Police say Percy was also in Canberra when Allen Redston was killed. Police have confirmed many similarities in the cases. They say Percy matches the description of suspects in some - including the Wanda Beach murders.
'Police found amazing and compelling evidence linking Percy to some of these crimes,' Australian crime writer John Silvester  told national broadcaster ABC.
'And if you look at the photofits that they have, which were taken at the time, they jump out as being Derek Ernest Percy.'
Moreover, many of these murders closely resemble things Percy wrote about before and after he killed Yvonne Tuohy in July 1969.
The manuscripts in the storage facility - and other writings by Percy - describe ways to abduct, mutilate and murder children. The material also shows Percy was interested in the 1965 Wanda Beach murders and the 1968 Stilwell killing.  Officers found a 1978 street directory  in which a line had been drawn through the St Kilda Pier  where Linda had vanished a decade earlier. Police also discovered an obscene drawing on which Percy had written the name 'Wanda'.
When police arrested Percy in 1969 they discovered he had maps of where Linda Stilwell, Christine Sharrock, Marianne Schmidt and Simon Brook had lived or were killed. In the storage facility, officers found 1960s-era razor blades similar to those used to mutilate Simon Brook. Two months after police found  the facility, Percy was interviewed by Victorian and New South Wales detectives in Port Phillip Prison.  He admitted nothing.
The latest material is the continuation of a disturbing pattern. Since adolescence, Percy had kept diaries documenting his violent sexual fantasies. The first of these were found by his parents.
More were found after Percy's arrest in 1969 at HMAS Cerberus,   a navy training base.   These writings discussed plans to abduct and torture children. In September 1971, prison staff discovered notes in Percy's cell in which he fantasised about a sex crime. They also found pictures of children, obscene material and diagrams on abducting people.
In 1998, Percy started  moves to be paroled. His case was rejected by the Victorian Supreme Court  in September of that year.   Over the years, the crime for which Percy was jailed - the  murder of Yvonne Tuohy - has also had terrible consequences, not least for the witness whose testimony helped jail Percy.
That fateful July day in 1969, Shane Spiller, then  11, had been walking on a Melbourne beach with Yvonne. Percy was watching them and abducted, tortured and killed Tuohy, but Spiller escaped. The boy gave police an excellent description of the killer, his car and the distinctive navy insignia on his vehicle.
Officers rushed to the nearby naval base, where they found Percy washing blood from his clothes.
The 11-year-old's evidence was vital in jailing Percy, but he never recovered from the experience. In 1998,  Spiller told The Age that identifying Percy in a police line-up had terrified him.
'In the line-up at Russell Street  [police station], I had to pick him. I had to walk up and point right at his nose. The look he gave me - I can still remember it,' he said.
In 2000, Spiller applied for crime compensation. He was initially awarded only A$5,000. On appeal, he was given A$50,000. In late August 2002, Spiller, who lived in the southeastern New South Wales town of Wyndham,  vanished. A police source said  he might have been killed for the compensation money. Four years earlier, Spiller had told The Age that his encounter with Percy had always haunted him.
'What happened stuffed me, ' he said.



Child killer returns to the public spotlight