A person wished over one in all Australia’s most notorious chilly instances, dubbed the Easey Street murders, has arrived in Melbourne after being extradited from Italy.
Suzanne Armstrong, 27, and Susan Bartlett, 28, had been stabbed to dying of their Melbourne dwelling in 1977, in a case that has gripped the nation ever since.
Police mentioned suspect Perry Kouroumblis, 65, turned the main focus of their investigation solely in recent times after DNA testing findings.
Kouroumblis, who has not been charged and maintains his innocence, was arrested in Italy in September. If charged, he’s anticipated to face court docket later this week, in keeping with native media.
Mr Kouroumblis first got here to the eye of police every week after the murders, when the then 17-year-old mentioned he discovered a bloody knife close to the scene in Easey Street, Collingwood, an inner-city suburb.
The our bodies of the highschool pals had been found three days after they had been final seen alive. Mrs Armstrong’s one-year-old son was additionally present in the home, unhurt in his cot.
Both ladies had been stabbed greater than a dozen instances and Ms. Armstrong was sexually assaulted, police say.
The case has lengthy attracted monumental curiosity, changing into the topic of main police complaints, true crime books and successful podcast. In 2017 Victoria Police provided a A$1 million (£511,800, $647,600) reward for info.
Commissioner Shane Patton described the killings as “a fully grotesque, horrific and frenzied killing” when he introduced the arrest of Kouroumblis – a twin Greek-Australian citizen – in Rome in September.
“This was a criminal offense that struck on the coronary heart of our group: two ladies in their very own dwelling, the place they need to have felt safer,” she mentioned.
Police had issued an Interpol pink discover for Mr Kouroumblis on two costs of homicide and one in all rape, after he left Australia about seven years in the past.
But he couldn’t be arrested in Greece, the place he lived, because the nation’s legislation requires homicide costs to be laid inside 20 years of the alleged crime.
At the time of Kouroumblis’ arrest, the ladies’s households launched a press release, saying their lives had been modified “irrevocably” by the killings.
“For two quiet households in rural Victoria it has at all times been unimaginable to grasp the useless and violent approach wherein Suzanne and Susan died,” the assertion learn.
Addressing the police, they mentioned: “For at all times giving us hope and by no means giving up, let’s simply say thanks.”
