Murder on Easey Street by Helen Thomas

Murder on Easey Street by Helen Thomas

Author:Helen Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd


CHAPTER 12

THE MEDIUM

NEARLY A YEAR after the coroner’s inquest, and eighteen months after the two women’s bodies were found in Collingwood, police had still not made an arrest. Perhaps more troubling was the fact that they seemed to have no real leads in their hunt for the murderer.

While most Australians were cheerfully enjoying Grease and Superman in cinemas that year, and the Bee Gees strangled the Top 10 with ‘Night Fever’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’, 24-year-old Gayle Armstrong battled a rising sense of desperation.

Still relatively new to the role of mother to her own son, let alone to her slain sister’s little boy, and without the psychological support or media advice that families of murder victims have access to now, she was navigating the consequences of her sister’s death as best she could. She even agreed to a request to take part in a ‘reading’ with a psychic. And not just any psychic.

At the time, British-born Doris Stokes was an internationally popular spiritualist, a professional medium who could fairly be described, at fifty-nine, as a ‘rock star’, her success the 1970s equivalent of America’s John Edwards today. Her appearances on The Don Lane Show prompted heated debate as she made ‘contact’ with dead relatives of the night-time talk show’s studio audience.

Stokes toured the country, making public appearances in entertainment venues in five capital cities that year. Her sessions in various small churches were even more confronting, as hundreds queued for hours, waiting to be touched by her ‘healing hands’ as she stood not far from the altar, stained-glass windows rising behind her.

She claimed to have helped UK police solve a couple of difficult murder cases and, given the air of wonder that swirled around her, it’s not hard to see why it might have occurred to a journalist to ask her to try to ‘see’ what happened at Easey Street. Nothing else had worked in terms of solving the double homicide, the reporter must have thought. What was there to lose?

The Sunday Press arranged the meeting between the media-savvy psychic and the grieving sister.

While Gayle can’t quite recall how this ‘special session’ was organised, it seems that she drove from her family’s home in Euroa to meet Stokes in Melbourne, with Sunday Press journalist Stephen O’Baugh and a photographer on hand to record it.

As they both settled into big, boxy armchairs, the medium explained she could not promise to make contact with Suzanne Armstrong. ‘If I can’t do it, I won’t give you a lot of hearts and flowers,’ she told Gayle.

She did much more than that.

Within minutes, Stokes claimed to have ‘summoned’ Suzanne’s spirit and, over the next two hours, proceeded to tell her sister not only how both women had died, but the names of the two men who killed them and the location of the murder weapon.

She also identified the make of the murderers’ car, explained how they had escaped from the house without being seen and outlined where she believed they were living. More disturbingly, this ‘seer’ told Gayle that her sister had known both men before they came to her house that night.



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