THE MYSTERIOUS PHILLIP ISLAND MURDER

by

Vikki Petraitis

BLURB

When 23-year-old Beth Barnard was discovered brutally murdered in a farmhouse in Phillip Island in 1986, her murder sparked an investigation that has haunted locals ever since. Her throat was cut, and she had a huge letter A carved into her chest. On the same night that Beth died, another local woman, Vivienne Cameron, vanished off the face of the earth. A police investigation revealed that Beth had been having an affair with Vivienne's husband. What really happened that night remains one of Victoria's most baffling murder mysteries.

THE MYSTERIOUS PHILLIP ISLAND MURDER

When a young woman was murdered on Phillip Island on the night of Monday 22 September 1986, the crime failed to make significant column inches in any but the local Island newspapers. This was odd, because it had all the staples of sensational headlines - a gruesome murder, adultery, money, and a missing wife. Soon, the case was largely forgotten by all except those who knew the victim and the woman accused of her murder.

Even though it fizzled to an unsatisfactory conclusion, the case never quite died down because it contained a mystery that made average people turn into armchair detectives to try and solve it. To date, no one has.

The beginning point was an affair between 36-year-old farmer Fergus Cameron and his 23-year-old farm hand, Elizabeth Barnard, or Beth to her friends. The trouble was, Fergus was married - to someone else.

Indeed his wife Vivienne had gotten wind of the affair and told anyone who cared to listen - mostly locals on the Island - that she was thinking of leaving Fergus, taking their two young boys and moving back to Melbourne. You see, this wasn't the first time her husband had cheated; and Vivienne was over it.

And then came the night of crisis that was to change everything forever.

There are a number of accounts of what happened that Monday night - some were later believed by detectives, some were not. But suffice to say, by the Tuesday morning, when a woman's mutilated body was discovered in a farmhouse on the Island, events were set in motion that would shatter several local families forever, and send ripples through the peaceful community.

Sergeant Cliff Ashe had just returned from leave and was working a morning shift at the Cowes police station on Tuesday 23 September. Two well-known locals, brothers-in-law Ian Cairns and Donald Cameron opened the creaking wire door and came over to the counter. Don Cameron had been on the shire council for some years, and his family was respected in the small community. Ashe was busy with paperwork, and listened as the two men spoke of some family difficulties.

'There's been a domestic argument,' said Don Cameron, before beginning a long and rambling explanation. Ashe reckoned Don talked for about 10 minutes about family fights and family conferences before the police officer interrupted him.

'Donald, exactly what are you trying to tell me?'

'Um, it's Beth,' Don said, leaning over the counter and looking from side to side. 'I think she's not well.' This was a strange way of putting it, given what he next told Ashe.

Beth's lifeless body was lying on the floor of her bedroom in her family's house in McFees Road, Ryhll. Even though she was mostly covered by a doona, Don had seen the vacant stare of her blue eyes, and enough blood to be sure. He finally said as much to the police officer. 'We were just at her place and she was lying on the floor with blood everywhere.'

Galvanised into action, Sergeant Ashe called detectives at the Wonthaggi Criminal Investigation Branch and told them to meet him at the McFees Road house. Ashe and one of his juniors from the station, Senior Constable Peter McHenry, drove behind Don Cameron and Ian Cairns to the house down a lonely country road where homes were secluded and set apart from each other.

Even in the pre-DNA days of 1986 when TV featured shows like Dynasty and Dallas rather than several variations of CSI, every cop knew that a crime scene needed to be preserved. Ashe and McHenry were responsible for securing the scene and limiting entry. Even so, given the vague complaints from Cairns and Cameron, Ashe thought it best to enter the house to make sure that the young woman inside was actually dead.

The sergeant walked carefully up the side driveway until he got to the back of the house - retracing the route that Don and Ian said they took earlier. He saw that both the screen door and the back door were slightly ajar. He opened them carefully and went inside; the house was dark and silent. It took only a couple of steps along the hallway to get to the first bedroom door.

Beth Barnard lay on the floor of the bedroom. Even though a quilt covered her from the nose down, Ashe could see her blue eyes were indeed vacant and unseeing. A large pool of congealed blood on the carpet around her head made it obvious to the police officer that Beth was dead even though he could see no injuries.

Ashe carefully lifted a corner of the quilt and pulled it up and saw something that he would remember forever. The young woman's throat had been sliced to the bone, nearly beheading her. In what was clearly a savage attack, a knife blow to her upper lip had smashed out one of her top front teeth. Ashe gently placed the quilt in its original position, and backed out of the room, shocked.

While Ashe was in the house, young Senior Constable Peter McHenry stood outside with Don and Ian. Not having seen the carnage inside, nor heard anything but a second-hand account on the ten-minute ride from the police station, McHenry listened as Don and Ian laughed and chatted as they waited for Ashe to re-emerge. He didn't think much of it at the time.

Ashe used his police car radio to call in detectives from the Homicide Squad. Minutes later, three CIB detectives arrived from Wonthaggi - Sergeant Ron Cooper, Senior Constable Alan (Jack) McFayden and Senior Detective Alan Lowe. The house had officially become a crime scene.

Detective Jack McFayden was a no-nonsense country copper and when he wasn't involved in the business of fighting crime, he loved nothing better than to hang a Gone Fishing sign on his door and disappear to his favourite fishing hole. He'd seen a lot of bodies in his long career, and it never got any easier.

McFayden entered the house. He was always conscious of the intrusion of a homicide investigation. He knew that the dead woman's secrets would be poured over by the detectives, and her dignity and privacy would fall victim to the urgency of catching whoever killed her.

While the body on the floor gave a chilling aspect to the bedroom, the rest of it was what one might expect from a young woman. Two single beds flanked opposite walls, piles of discarded clothes lay around, and stuffed animals fought for space on top of the chest-of-drawers with photos and bottles of perfume. Next to the clutter were some cold and flu tablets and a bottle of cough medicine. There was also a glass of water and some pain-killers. One of the beds was unmade, while the other was ruffled and blood-stained.

McFayden took in the bedroom and its contents and made a cursory search of the rest of the house - just in case there were further victims. But everything else seemed in order and there was no sign that the struggle had continued anywhere else; although there was some blood around the bathroom taps. Perhaps the killer had washed his hands afterwards. Or her hands.

Back outside, into the bright September day, McFayden noticed a couple of drops of blood on the concrete path outside the back door. Did that mean that the fleeing killer was injured as well? At this early stage, everything was mere conjecture.

First things first. Jack McFayden went with Ian Cairns and Donald Cameron to the police station where he would take their statements. He wanted to know how the two farmers came to discover the young woman's body. From their initial conversations, it seemed Beth was a friend of their family. It also seemed that she had been having an affair with Don Cameron's brother, Fergus.

While local cops stood outside guarding the crime scene, Beth's body lay undisturbed inside. She would not be moved until the crime scene had been fully examined and processed.

Having made the drive from Melbourne, Homicide detectives Rory O'Connor and Garry Hunter arrived on Phillip Island. In their wake, came crime scene examiners Sergeant Hughie Peters and Senior Constable Brian Gamble, along with a police photographer and fingerprint expert to examine the house to try and make sense of what had occurred.

O'Connor and Hunter got the gist of the story from Don and Ian. The previous evening, Fergus had apparently admitted to his wife that he was having an affair with the dead woman, and had then been attacked by his Vivienne. Don explained that, during the fight, Vivienne had stabbed her husband with a broken wine glass and then taken him to the hospital to get stitched up.

Ian, who was married to Fergus's sister Marnie, said that Fergus had spent the rest of the night at their farm just up the road from his.

Don Cameron said that Vivienne had called friends in the middle of the night, after she'd dropped Fergus at Marnie and Ian's, and asked them to come and collect her two young boys.

According to the two men, the family hadn't known about the boys until the babysitting friend rang them earlier that morning to ask what she should do with the children because she had to go to work. It was then that they all realised that both Vivienne and the family's Toyota Land Cruiser were missing.

So, right from the get-go, the suggestion was that Vivienne Cameron rang the babysitter in the middle of the night, then drove out to Beth Barnard's place and killed her. And there was something else, that the detectives from Homicide were about to discover, that would add a certain weight to that theory.

Before the Homicide Squad arrived, the local cops Cliff Ashe and Jack McFayden had only lifted the doona enough to see the vicious wounds to her Beth's throat. It wasn't until detectives Rory O'Connor, and Garry Hunter lifted the doona off completely that anyone saw the thing that, at first, they could hardly fathom. Carved deeply and clearly into Beth's chest and abdomen, was a giant letter 'A'.

For those who've studied not literature, there was an obscure work of 19th century American fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne called The Scarlet Letter. The story revolved around a woman who is censured by her Puritan community for having a child out of wedlock. Her punishment was to wear a scarlet letter - A for adulteress - on all her clothing.

If the A was carved into Beth to brand her an adulteress, then who would have more reason to so that than Vivienne Cameron?

It was the job of crime scene examiners Peters and Gamble to examine the house for any evidence that might assist in the investigation. Homicide detectives look for motives and listen to people's stories; crime scene examiners look for physical evidence that will create a connection between the victim and the offender. As such, it was important for them to know the version of events as given by any witnesses, so that they could see if it fitted the evidence.

In these early hours, Gamble and Peters heard that a local woman, Vivienne Cameron had attacked her husband at their farmhouse in Ventnor, over an affair with the dead woman, and had then vanished. To the crime scene examiners, this meant two things: there could be a possible offender to link to the crime scene; and there was a second scene they had to examine - the Cameron's farmhouse where the wine glass attack had taken place.

Examining a crime scene is painstaking work and while it is carried out, the body must remain in situ - exactly where it was found. No matter who she was in life, in death, Beth Barnard had essentially become a piece of evidence to be photographed, examined, and swabbed for evidence.

Beth's body was the starting point. She was photographed from a number of different angles while Gamble made sketches of her bedroom and noted the position of the beds and the furniture in relation to her body. Once that was done, the doona was removed and bagged as evidence. Next to the body, lay a bloodied wooden-handled knife which could be the murder weapon.

Gamble didn't suffer from squeamishness when it came to the dead - it was all part of his job. Beth was clothed in a pink nightie which was pulled up to expose her chest and the hideous letter A. There were only a few patches of the pink nightie that hadn't turned plum-red with blood. Interestingly, one of the parts of the nightie that wasn't stained was directly underneath the right side of the letter A. This suggested that the carving may have been a post-mortem addition made after her heart was no longer pumping blood.

What Gamble was interested in, were the circular smears of dried blood on Beth's legs. Did the killer rub his or her hands over the body as she bled? Another interesting fact was the damage to Beth's face. She had been stabbed in the chin, and her upper lip; and one of her front teeth had been dislodged in the attack. Gamble found the tooth on the carpet next to the body. This kind of damage could have been part of a frenzied attack, or it could have been a deliberate effort to disfigure the pretty young victim.

Gamble collected anything he considered evidence to be bagged and tagged and lodged for examination at the Forensic Science Laboratory. After many hours of meticulous examination, he collected over 70 items.

To those who are trained to see it, every crime scene tells the story of what happened. Even though Beth's body was found on the floor, it appeared that the initial assault had taken place in her bed. Blood stained the sheets, and there was a bloodied handprint on the wall next to the bed. Beth either got out of bed or was pulled out, and the attack continued on the floor of the room. Gamble could tell that it wasn't a prolonged or particularly physical struggle, because small ornaments on the nearby chest of drawers were still standing and little else in the small bedroom had been disturbed. Even the small lamp next to Beth's bed was still standing.

Beth hadn't died without defending herself though, and her body bore perhaps the most heart-breaking of injuries. Stab wounds to her elbows and forearms showed she had held her arms in front of herself during the attack; and a particularly nasty slice in the webbing of her right thumb showed that she had tried to fend off the knife blows with her hands.

After he'd finished processing the bedroom, Gamble continued his work in the rest of the house. The doona that covered the body, it seemed, had been taken from another bedroom, not Beth's. Little else was disturbed, but the bathroom showed evidence that the killer had washed up in the basin, leaving traces of blood around the taps. There were also cigarette butts in an ashtray. Did they belong to the killer?

There was no sign that the offender had been anywhere else in the house. All the doors except the back door were locked, and dust around the secured windows eliminated them as possible points of entry. It seemed that the killer had entered through the back door and gone straight into Beth's bedroom; unless they were already inside the house - perhaps already in Beth's bedroom.

Most homicide victims are killed by people they know. Had Beth been entertaining someone in her bedroom? All of these questions would need to be considered later by the Homicide detectives.

Outside the back door, a concrete path led from the house to the yard. There were two tiny drops of blood on the concrete. Brian Gamble took scrapings of these and labelled them for further analysis.

Meanwhile the fingerprint expert dusted the crime scene, as well as the knife found near the body. They found no distinguishable prints. The team worked well into the night. An eerie quiet settled over the scene as darkness fell on the lonely farmhouse.

Once the crime scene has yielded its basic story, it is no place for the Homicide detectives. They let the forensics team do their work while they begin the investigation.

Beth's closest neighbour remembered seeing a car drive up McFees Road the previous evening at 7.50pm. It turned into Beth's driveway and sat for several minutes with its headlights on. Another woman further up the road, recalled hearing a car come up past her place at 3.30am. She said that the car had sounded like her son's Toyota tray truck.

If Vivienne Cameron had called a babysitter in the middle of the night, could it have been her Toyota Land Cruiser that the neighbour heard?

At the Cowes police station, Detective Jack McFayden took a statement from Donald Cameron. He wrote while Don spoke.

'At approximately 7.45 this morning, I received a phone call from Mrs Robyn Dixon, who is a close family friend. She was concerned because she hadn't heard from Fergus and Viv, and she couldn't get them on the phone. She said she had the children with her. As she had to go to work, she said she'd put the school-aged child on the bus with her two boys, and I told her not to worry, I would come to pick up the other child.'

Don collected the younger boy, Hugh, then drove past Fergus's house and noticed that Vivienne's Holden Sedan was still in the driveway.

'I got home and my wife Pam rang my sister Marnie, and Fergus answered the phone. He seemed really distressed and didn't want to talk to us, so he handed the phone to Marnie's husband, Ian [Cairns]. Ian diplomatically told Pam that something had happened and he would talk to us later. Pam insisted that we know what had happened because we had their child with us.

'Fergus then got back on the phone and told Pam that there had been a row the night before and he had been injured and had to be treated at the hospital. We gathered that the row had been of a domestic nature and it had involved Beth Barnard. But other than that, Fergus was pretty uncommunicative.'

Don said that Ian had telephoned a short time later and told him that Fergus's Land Cruiser was missing. Apparently Fergus had wanted Ian and Don to drive to Beth's house to tell her what had happened.

Don said that he drove to Ian's house to pick up his brother-in-law, and they had then driven to Fergus's house. They walked around it and called out to Vivienne but she was nowhere to be found. They then drove to Beth's house.

'We drove up the driveway and saw Beth's farm ute and her own car parked in their usual spots. I walked to the back door and knocked but there was no answer. The porch light was on and I saw that the door was open about six inches. I called out but there was no answer. I took a step inside and saw the door to my left. Just beyond the door, I saw Beth lying there on the floor covered with a quilt. Her face was almost covered but I recognised her and she appeared to be dead. I yelled out to Ian: "Come here quick, the worst has happened". We immediately left to report what we'd found at the Cowes police station. That's really all I can tell you.'

Don Cameron signed his statement at 12.50pm.

Like Senior Constable Peter McHenry earlier, Jack McFayden was struck by Don Cameron's demeanour. He would later say, 'I've never seen a bunch of people so cool, calm and collected. You'd think these blokes discovered bodies every day of their lives.'

Jack McFayden wanted to speak to the woman who had collected the Cameron children in the middle of the night. Was she the last person to speak to Vivienne Cameron? Was there a link between Vivienne organising for the children to be picked up at 3am, and the neighbours hearing a car driving in Beth's street at 3.30am? Hoping she could shed some light on matters, the detective tracked Robyn Dixon down at work.

According to Robyn, it was her husband, John, who had answered the phone in the middle of the night. Vivienne said she was calling from the hospital, and asked John to go and get her children and take them home for the night. Robyn explained that she and her husband had driven to the Cameron's house where they woke the children and took them home.

Robyn noticed that Vivienne's Holden sedan was in the garage. She wondered if perhaps Fergus and Viv had gone to the hospital in an ambulance. Inside the house, the Dixons saw Vivienne's handbag and thought she must have left in a hurry.

That morning, when Robyn had to go to work, she had tried to call Viv but got no answer. When she tried to ring Don Cameron, it took her 15 minutes to get through because their line was engaged. When she finally did, Don said he knew nothing about what had gone on the night before. He agreed to collect Hugh so that Robyn could go to work. The older child was sent to school.

McFayden wondered who Donald Cameron, or his wife Pam, had been speaking to for the 15 minutes that morning when Robyn Dixon was trying to call them.

For most of Tuesday, both Vivienne Cameron and the family's Land Cruiser were missing - until, Pam Cameron discovered the Land Cruiser on her way home from work that afternoon. She had by then, obviously, heard that Beth had been murdered; and that Viv and the vehicle were nowhere to be found. As she drove home across the Phillip Island bridge from San Remo, she saw the missing vehicle parked on a wide nature strip adjoining a playground on the Island side of the bridge.

Detectives, McFayden, O'Connor and Hunter arrived at Forrest Avenue in Newhaven, to find the Land Cruiser parked and locked. Pam later told them that she had found it unlocked and that she had taken the keys out of the ignition, gathered Viv's hand bag from the seat, then locked the doors.

If the car had been parked there all day, it meant that the police had all driven past it on their way to and from the Island.

But here was one piece of curious evidence. Detective McFayden remembered his earlier conversation with Robyn Dixon, who'd said that Vivienne's handbag was at the Cameron house when she picked up the children. This meant that Viv hadn't taken it with her to the hospital. But If it was later found in the Land Cruiser, did that mean that Vivienne drove to kill Beth, then returned home for her handbag only to dump the car with the bag in it?

While the detectives looked over the Land Cruiser, they wondered about the fate of Vivienne Cameron. The car was parked several hundred metres from the start of the bridge. McFayden immediately searched the bridge for any signs that Vivienne may have jumped. He walked slowly along both sides looking for any break in the salty film on the guard rail. He found nothing to suggest that Viv might have jumped 10 metres into the icy water below. And while the car was parked within a short walk of the bridge, it was only metres from a bus stop.

A local baker later gave a statement that he had seen a vehicle parked on the nature strip at 5am. Even though the baker wrote in his statement: I can not say what type of car it was or colour, all I can say is that there was a car parked there, this information would form the basis of a very specific Coronial finding. But that would come later.

The detectives found a friend of Beth's, called Maree, who had spent several hours with Beth on the day she died. They had met at Maree's house. Beth was still feeling the effects of the flu and had antibiotics in her handbag. Part of their conversation was about Beth's relationship with Fergus. He was coming over that evening and Beth said she planned to give Fergus an ultimatum. She was tired of having a relationship with a married man who wouldn't leave his wife. Beth had been deeply in love with Fergus and had always believed the Cameron marriage was over in all but name before her affair with Fergus had begun.

Maree said that Beth left her house early in the afternoon to return to McFees Road, so she could prepare dinner for Fergus. It was the last time she would ever see her best friend.

A post-mortem examination on Beth Barnard revealed that one of the stab wounds in her chest had pierced her pericardium and vena cava. Beth had bled into her chest cavity and death would have occurred only minutes after that wound was inflicted. The pathologist concluded that Beth was alive when she was stabbed in the chest, but no similar conclusions could be made about other wounds.

With the possibility that Vivienne had suicided off the Phillip Island bridge, members from the Search and Rescue Squad searched the bottom of Western Port Bay. If she had jumped, there was a good possibility police divers would find her.

After an initial drifting period where air is expired from a body, it becomes a dead weight and sinks. As the body decomposes, it filled with gases and floats again. But in the early days, if Vivienne had jumped, she should have been located relatively close to the bridge. Or at least her glasses or shoes might be there.

Even though Search and Rescue were optimistic that if she had jumped, they would find her, there had indeed been cases of people drowning in Westernport Bay and never being recovered. And since their search turned up nothing, it left them with two possible scenarios: either she jumped and drifted away, or she didn't jump at all.

As news of the murder swept the small Island community, people were shocked - both by the fact that Beth had been murdered; and that Vivienne Cameron was missing and might be involved.

A local woman and friend of Vivienne's, called Glenda, was particularly distraught. She had spoken to Viv, on the phone, on Tuesday morning at 10am; but now the news report was saying that Vivienne's car had been sighted at 5am near the bridge and police divers were searching the waters underneath the bridge for her body.

Glenda called the police immediately. She gave a statement to Jack McFayden, and then to the Homicide detectives who arrived to double-check her claim. She told them that at 10am on Tuesday morning - when Beth was already dead and Vivienne supposedly missing - Vivienne had called her to ask about a patchwork pattern that Glenda had promised to chase up for her. Another friend had stayed with Glenda on the Monday night, and was there the next morning at 10am to witness Vivienne Cameron's telephone call.

Glenda assured the police officers that it was Viv on the phone; and had another piece of information to add. The other side of the telephone conversation had been interrupted by voices - voices that Glenda assumed were Vivienne's two young boys talking in the background. Glenda had even asked her if the boys were playing up. Vivienne had been non-committal in her replay, saying, 'It's okay now'.

It seemed to Glenda, however, that the detectives doubted her phone call with Viv. They tried to suggest that it might have been Monday when she called, not Tuesday. But Glenda was certain. And she had her friend, Pam, as a witness. Pam wasn't even there on the Monday morning.

Glenda could never believe that the woman, with whom she had a completely normal conversation with on Tuesday morning, could have mutilated a young woman only hours before their phone conversation.

Nonetheless, her information was explosive. Was Vivienne alive at 10am? Was she still alive? And more importantly, if there were voices in the background, who else knew where she was?

In one day, Fergus Cameron had lost both his wife and his lover. When Detective McFayden visited him to take his statement, he found Fergus, wearing pyjamas, propped up in bed claiming he was feeling the after-effects of his injuries. Fergus had been staying with his sister Marnie, and her husband Ian since Monday night.

Despite his losses, Fergus was calm and was able to give his account of what happened.

Vivienne and Fergus had been married 10 years and had two children. They had been having marital difficulties which had been compounded by Fergus's affair with Beth Barnard. He had met Beth when they both worked at the Penguin Parade and he had then employed her as a farmhand. It wasn't long before the two began having an affair that had lasted until her death.

Fergus described his strained relationship with his wife, and said that she had noticed that he gave Beth favoured treatment. He told the detective that several times in their relationship, he and Beth had decided to stop seeing each other, but their resolutions had never lasted.

In December of 1985, Vivienne had caught Fergus in the shearing shed with his arm around Beth. That, according to Fergus, was the first time his wife had accused him of having an affair. He told her that he and Beth were just good mates. Nonetheless, Beth had been shaken by the confrontation, and quit working at the Cameron farm.

A short while after that, Fergus explained that he'd come home in the early hours of the morning from a Christmas party at Beth's. He said that Vivienne had attacked him, punching him in the face and back.

Despite Beth's resolve to leave the Penguin Parade job and the job at the Cameron farm, Fergus said that the pull of their relationship was stronger and she was soon back working at both jobs. He said that Vivienne had questioned the wisdom of having Beth working on the farm. The tension between Vivienne and Fergus culminated in a fight around shearing time.

'We had all been drinking, including myself, and when we'd gone up to the house, Vivienne became violent with me over Beth,' Fergus said. 'She said that Beth was a scheming little bitch and in general criticising her to the point of hatred. She was very disparaging as to my admiration for Beth, but did not to my knowledge accuse me of having an affair with her but I think she assumed I was.

'During this argument she punched me half a dozen to a dozen times around the face, arms and chest and at that time I was sitting on a stool in the back porch. I feel that she had every right to do what she was doing, not because of my association with Beth but because she deserved some answers and I wasn't giving her any. Although Vivienne was drinking on this occasion, she wasn't drunk but probably had enough to drink to say what she had wanted to say for a long while.'

The way Fergus spoke about his wife implied that she was an hysterical violent woman, insane with jealousy.

Now that he had the background, McFayden needed Fergus Cameron's account of the night Beth died. Fergus said Beth had been sick with the flu and feeling down, but on Monday night, she seemed more cheerful. She had met him at the back door after he'd finished his shift at 8pm at the Penguin Parade. Fergus commented on the fact that the security door wasn't locked when he got there. 'I told her to be more security conscious and keep the door locked.'

Fergus said that he and Beth had discussed their relationship optimistically. He said that he left around 9.05pm and, while they had 'kissed and cuddled' each other, they hadn't made love. He admitted having sex with her on the Sunday night, but not the Monday night.

Fergus left Beth promising to visit again the next morning. When he got home, he found Viv sitting at their kitchen table with his sister, Marnie. He described Marnie as being 'very agitated' and Vivienne was 'visibly trembling'. Apparently, the two women had rung the Penguin Parade looking for him at 8pm only to be told that he'd left for the night.

Marnie left a short time later and Fergus said that Vivienne had launched into him as soon as his sister was gone, screaming at him, 'Where have you been?'

'I just said, "I've been talking to Beth". She then raced at me with the glass of wine and screamed, "I knew you were with the little bitch". I think she hit me with the wine glass which broke on the left side of my head and cut my left ear. I turned my back away from her and she hit me two or three times with the broken glass.'

Fergus said he had been standing in the doorway between his dining room and the hall. He then turned and walked to a bedroom at the top of the house, where he sat on the bed. A significant amount of blood was later found on and around the bed. However, forensic tests later showed it wasn't his.

He told McFayden that Vivienne had followed him to the bedroom. 'She was screaming out things including, "I knew what was going on. I've been watching the number of hours you've been working. I suppose everyone out there knew what was going on". She said a lot of other things but I can't remember what they were.'

Fergus said Vivienne's rage had quickly changed to concern, 'as there was blood everywhere and she wanted to take me to hospital immediately'. Forensic tests would later show that Fergus's blood was only found on the shirt he had been wearing, on a pink tissue in his bathroom and on a blue pullover belonging to Vivienne. But Jack McFayden didn't know that yet.

Fergus said agreed to go to the hospital and they rang Marnie and asked her to come back and mind the children. They left before she got there. As she pulled up at the hospital, Fergus said that Viv was calm.

'As she was turning off the ignition she turned to me and said, "I'm just going to get the little bitch".' Fergus said that he hadn't taken the threat against Beth seriously.

When they got back home, Marnie left them to it. Fergus said Vivienne then suggested: 'that we separate immediately, that she resign from her job and move to Melbourne [and] that I have custody of our children. I agreed to this and she said that I was an excellent father. She wasn't a very good mother and I disagreed and she gave me two warnings, one was not to be too stern with the children, and not to take it for granted that Beth was going to make an excellent mother.'

Fergus said that he and Vivienne had parted amicably when she drove him up to stay at Marnie's house. He said that was the last time he'd seen her.

The next morning, he got a phone call from Pam Cameron who said that Vivienne had called a friend to come and get the children in the middle of the night.

'My anxiety was further increased,' he told the detective, 'when I was told that Vivienne had taken the Land Cruiser, which was parked in the shearing shed. On hearing the Land Cruiser, Beth would automatically think it was me and open the door. The two people who drove the Land Cruiser were either Beth or myself.'

The crime scene examiners began a search of Vivienne and Fergus's house as soon as they had finished with the Barnard farm. Brian Gamble sketched a plan of the house, then examined every room. According to Fergus's statement, he and Vivienne had argued in the kitchen where she had attacked him with the wine glass. Gamble found bloodstains in the hallway and spare bedroom, the bathroom and the pink bloodstained tissue that Fergus said he had used to stem the flow of blood from his cut ear, bloodstains on the floor in the bathroom, bloodstained clothing in the laundry and also the Cameron's Holden Kingswood with its bloodstained front passenger seat.

Inside the Cameron house, Gamble immediately noticed the blood splatters when he walked through the doorway of the front, spare bedroom. His notes record: 'I then entered the front spare bedroom… scattered over the bed were a number of papers. I observed a number of blood stains in the room. On the floor between the western side of the bed and the western wall, were a number of blood droplets. On the bedspread and papers on the bed were a number of blood droplets. On the front of the chest of drawers was a blood smear'.

Gamble found no trace of the broken wine glass.

A backlog of cases meant that it was a month after the murder when Dr Atchison analysed material collected from the Barnard and Cameron homes. At the crime scene and the Cameron home, the blood trail matched the stories. Beth had been attacked in bed and had bled in her room. The killer had washed up in the bathroom leaving blood around the taps. This blood would probably belong to Beth, but the drips on the path outside the backdoor might mean that the killer had bled at the scene.

At the Cameron home, Fergus said that he had been attacked by Vivienne and had walked into the spare room and then cleaned up in the bathroom. Accordingly, the blood found in these areas would be expected to be his.

In the analysis of the forensic evidence in pre-DNA days, scientist Dr Bentley Atchison used ABO blood groupings. There are four ABO blood groups - groups A, B, O and AB. By analysing polymorphic enzymes present in blood, further sub-groups of the four main blood types can be identified. These further sub-groups of the four blood types are known as the PGM (Phosphoglucomutase) types.

Dr Atchison found, by analysing the containers of blood that he had received, that Beth's blood group was Type O, PGM 1 and Fergus's was Type O, PGM 2-1. He had no sample of Vivienne's blood to analyse, but according to hospital records from when Vivienne gave birth to her two sons, he knew her blood group to be Type A. Dr Atchison was unaware of her PGM sub-group. But since the three main people in this domestic tragedy had different blood types, it would be easy for Dr Atchison to determine who had bled where.

Fergus's blood was found on his shirt and on a tissue in the bathroom. The blood in the spare room was Type A - Vivienne's type; and blood on the papers in the spare room was Type O, PGM 1 - Beth's blood type.

Blood examined to be Type A, which could have been Vivienne's blood, was found on a maroon towel from Beth's bathroom, the path outside Beth's house, a cigarette packet and the match box found in the Cameron's Land Cruiser; and a face washer also found in the Land Cruiser.

Dr Atchison also found Type A blood in the scrapings taken from the spare bedroom at the Cameron's house and from their laundry. If the Type A blood belonged to Vivienne, it meant that she had bled quite a lot.

Dr Atchison made a sketch of the pink nightshirt that Beth had been wearing when she was killed. He coloured in the areas of blood-staining with a red pen. He indicated on his sketch where the knife had gone through the shirt when Beth had been stabbed. The sketch indicates seven cuts in the material of the shirt - six in the front and one in the back. 'I thought some of the cuts [on the front of the shirt] were unusual. There were two holes [close together], a longer one and then a shorter one, with a small gap in between,' Dr Atchison says.

'I asked the experts. They didn't really know. They thought it was a fishing knife. You had the double hole which you can start thinking of all sorts of knives... it penetrates making two holes. But other people who are much more experienced than I am said that you can get a hit with a knife and another sort of jab... it really didn't go anywhere. As far as I recall, I had problems saying that knife found near the body caused that sort of double hole.'

Homicide and local detectives interviewed as many people as they could find who might have input into Beth's murder and Vivienne's disappearance. Their enquiries turned up a couple of interesting facts. Beth had a young admirer who sent her flowers and apparently drove past her house a lot. In the days before stalking was a recognised phenomenon, the man was merely a nuisance that Beth had laughed about with friends. She even described his behaviour in a taped conversation she sent to an overseas pal.

I've got this problem how he keeps mowing my lawns, and I don't want him to, 'cause I feel as if I owe him something when he does it. And, he mowed them again on Monday and I get home and yelled at him and he got really pissed off and, so anyway he just took off and comes back Monday night and I thought "oh beauty, I've got rid of him now". And he came back Monday night and got mad at me and, fair dinkum, I just feel like telling him where to go now, and then he came to work at Cameron's on Tuesday 'cause we were lamb marking, and all day I was in a real shit and I kept trying to find other jobs to do and he just comes and takes over my jobs and tells me what to do. Fergus thought I was being really good trying to do all these other things and I was just trying to get away and so I'm just sick of him. I wish they'd do something to stop him coming around. We gave him all these hints not to come around tonight, so if he comes, I think I'll just knock him out!'

At no time did his antics seem to do anything but annoy Beth. She never indicated that she was scared of him, but he was worth talking to anyway. Although his statement never appeared in any formal briefs of evidence, detectives said that they spoke to him and he had an alibi for the night of Beth's murder.

It was one thing to look for people who might have had a grudge against Beth, but the solution to the murder and disappearance meant that any suspect had to be a link to both women. It would be too much of a coincidence to believe that Beth was killed by someone who wanted her dead, or even in a random murder; and that Vivienne disappeared on the same night in unrelated circumstances.

No, the detectives reasoned, it looked very much like Vivienne had fought with Fergus who confirmed the affair. She dropped him off at his sister, Marnie's house - a fact that Marnie confirmed - and then organised to get the children looked after, and then drove out to kill Beth. She took the Land Cruiser on purpose so that Beth would think Fergus was visiting and open the door to him.

But a couple of things didn't add up. According to her friends, Beth was very security conscious, but more tellingly she was attacked in her bed. That meant that she didn't open the door to anyone; or, if she did, then she ended up back in bed for the attack to occur there. The latter was hardly something she'd do if it was Vivienne who visited her in the middle of the night to confront her.

And then there was the phone call that Vivienne's friend Glenda got the morning after the murder. Glenda never wavered from her story - Viv sounded absolutely normal and there were voices in the background during their conversation.

And what of Vivienne Cameron? Was she the type of woman to give up everything in order to get revenge against a rival? Her friends say she wasn't. One friend claims that in the days before she disappeared, Vivienne had spoken to her about leaving Fergus and taking her two sons to Melbourne. Friends also described her dedication to her children. They maintain that she never would have left them. Vivienne had also said that if it hadn't been Beth, it would have been someone else. Would a woman direct murderous rage against the 'other woman' rather than a husband? If so, it was the only case on record in Victorian criminal history where this had happened.

When the investigation failed to turn up any concrete evidence or witnesses, the Homicide detectives were satisfied that Vivienne murdered Beth then took her own life.

An inquest for Vivienne Cameron was held less than two years after her disappearance. On 21 July 1988, Coroner Mr Maher, the same coroner who had conducted Beth Barnard's inquest 11 months earlier, made a very specific finding:

I, Mr B J Maher, Coroner, having investigated the death of Vivienne Janice Cameron, find that the identity of the deceased was Vivienne Janice Cameron and that the death occurred on 23rd September, 1986 near the bridge which separates Phillip Island from the mainland in the following circumstances. During the night of the 22nd and 23rd day of September, 1986 Elizabeth Barnard died from knife wounds in her chest and that Vivienne Janice Cameron has not been seen since 1.00am on the 23 rd day of September, 1986. On the night in question, it is believed that Vivienne Janice Cameron was driving [a] Toyota Land Cruiser… This vehicle was found abandoned near the said bridge on the Phillip Island side of the bridge. Despite an intensive Police search, no trace has been found of the said Vivienne Janice Cameron with whom they wished to speak concerning the death of Elizabeth Barnard. Although her body has not been found, I am satisfied that she is dead and that she leapt from the bridge into the water. And I further find that the deceased contributed to the cause of death.

Curiously, years later, a close relative of Vivienne Cameron spoke of briefing a Queen's Counsel to appear at Vivienne's Inquest to represent her interests. The relative said that the QC and several family members made the long drive from Melbourne and arrived at the Korumburra Court House before the scheduled Inquest time of 10am - only to find that the Inquest was already over. If the relative's story is accurate, one can only wonder how the Coroner had time to consider the vast amount of evidence and come to such a specific conclusion.

Another puzzle in this mysterious case was the lack of evidence to suggest Vivienne's guilt. Indeed, one wonders that if she surfaced, alive and well today, whether she would be found guilty of Beth's murder in a court of law.

Every devoted CSI viewer knows that every contact leaves a trace. The problem with this was that the items with Vivienne's A-type blood - except for the drops on the path - are all transportable. There was a hand-towel in Beth's bathroom and a face-washer found in the Land Cruiser.

Interestingly, when Marnie Cairns gave her statement to the police, she mentions a towel and a face-washer - she saw them at the Cameron's house when she went to mind the children after Fergus and Vivienne went to the hospital.

'I went into the toilet and noticed a pile of blood soaked clothing consisting of a singlet, T shirt, a pale blue shirt from the Penguin Parade, a face washer and a towel. There were also some tissues in the basin which had blood on them. Ian arrived shortly after and I showed him the clothing. He suggested that we leave it where it was and not touch it.'

One would assume Marnie mentioned the towel and face-washer along with other blood-stained items because they too had blood on them, but only the pink tissue and the blue shirt tested positive for Fergus's blood. The singlet is not mentioned in the list of items taken by police for examination. Nor is there a towel or a face washer mentioned as being taken from the Cameron house.

Another place where one would expect trace evidence is in the Land Cruiser. If Vivienne Cameron murdered Beth Barnard, she would have been covered in blood. She was last seen wearing a mohair jumper. When Beth's body was examined, it was found that the throat wound was probably caused by someone standing behind her holding her head to one side - one carotid artery was severed while the other wasn't - and cutting her throat with the other. This would mean that at least the perpetrator's sleeve would be soaked in blood. And yet there is not a trace of Beth's blood in the Land Cruiser. Not even a single mohair fibre with blood on it. And not only that, there were no traces of mohair on the victim.

If every contact leaves a trace, why wasn't there more evidence to link Vivienne with the crime scene, and the crime scene with the Land Cruiser?

And as for the Land Cruiser - if Vivienne drove from Beth's to the bridge, how did her handbag get in the car?

And so the mystery endures. People still talk about it, behind closed doors. When no one is brought to justice, people look suspiciously at each other and rumours abound; so many in fact that over two decades later, it is difficult to separate the fact from the fiction.

In 2005, an episode of Sensing Murder went to air. Three psychics were asked to look at the murder of Beth Barnard and try and make sense of it. If one believes in this type of investigation - and many don't - they would have been interested in the fact that none of the three psychics had any sense that Vivienne was the perpetrator. One psychic, Scott Russell Hill even claimed to have seen Vivienne's own murder. Over 500 people emailed the producer of Sensing Murder after the episode went to air. Most of them called for the police to take another look at the case.

Homicide detectives in Victoria are willing to look at any solid piece of evidence that comes to light, however, they don't put any stock in the word of psychics.

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Copyright © Vikki Petraitis

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-In-Publication data:

Petraitis, Vikki

The Mysterious Phillip Island Murder

ISBN 978-0-9873419-9-0

Cover Design © Rae Cooper

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THE MYSTERIOUS PHILLIP ISLAND MURDER