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CANBERRA - Police have reopened the 41-year-old investigation into the disappearance of South Australia's Beaumont children, one of the nation's most enduring and tragic mysteries.
A Melbourne magistrate yesterday gave permission for police to interview Victoria's longest-serving prisoner, Derek Ernest Percy, following the discovery of thousands of documents in a city storage unit.
The documents could also implicate the 58-year-old Percy in the unsolved murders of five other children in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne in the mid-1960s.
Percy is at present serving an indefinite term in prison after being found to be unfit to plead because of insanity for the 1969 murder of 12-year-old Yvonne Tuohy on a Tooradin, Western Port, beach near Melbourne.
The renewed investigation was launched after police seized 35 boxes of diaries, newspaper clippings and files, as well as razor blades similar to those used in one of the murders, from a self-storage unit rented by Percy for more than 20 years.
The Age newspaper reported that the material included newspaper articles on sex crimes, pictures of children, a video with a rape theme and handwritten stories on sex offences involving abduction and torture.
Percy managed to collect and transfer the material from his prison cell to the storage unit despite being one of Australia's most violent sex criminals and judged too dangerous to release.
Yesterday, Magistrate Belinda Wallington agreed with police that it was in the interests of justice for Percy to be interviewed in connection with the series of 40-year-old murders.
The most infamous was the disappearance of the Beaumont children - Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4 - on Australia Day, January 26, 1966.
The children took a bus from their home in the Adelaide suburb of Somerton Park to the beach at Glenelg, a short ride away and disappeared, in a case that has become folklore.
The massive police investigation produced three suspects besides Percy: Bevan Spencer von Einhem, jailed for life for another killing, who told a police witness he had killed the Beaumonts; the late Arthur Stanley Brown, tried for the murders of Judith, 7, and Susan, 5, Mackay in Queensland but freed after the jury failed to reach a verdict; and James Ryan O'Neill, jailed for life in 1975 for the murder of a Tasmanian boy.
Percy is also suspected of killing 15-year-old Sydney teenagers Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt at Wanda Beach in 1965, six-year-old Allen Redstone in Canberra in 1966, three-year-old Simon Brook in Sydney in 1968, and Linda Stilwell, 7, in Melbourne the same year.
The Age, which first reported the discovery of Percy's storage unit and the possible links to the series of child murders, said the former navy rating had amassed A$200,000 from his service pension, invested successfully in gold, and compiled a stamp collection valued at several thousand dollars.
The newspaper said Percy had written diaries detailing his violent sexual urges since he was a teenager, including writings outlining plans to abduct and torture children found after he was arrested for the murder of Yvonne Tuohy.
In 1971 a search of his prison cell uncovered elaborate blueprints of planned sex crimes, pictures of children, obscene notes and complex charts showing abduction plots.
Percy claimed he had been encouraged to write down his fantasies for therapeutic purposes by a prison psychiatrist and later claimed to have never again written anything that could be indicative of sexual fantasies.
But the Age said that he had smuggled writings and clippings out of jail and had them stored in tea chests and cardboard boxes.
Among them was a 1978 street directory with a line drawn through St Kilda Pier, where Linda Stilwell had been abducted a decade previously.
When he was arrested in 1969 police found Percy had maps of the areas where Linda Stilwell, Christine Sharrock, Marianne Schmidt and Simon Brook lived or were murdered, the Age said.
