A person wished over certainly one of Australia’s most notorious chilly circumstances, dubbed the Easey Avenue 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 home in 1977, in a case which has gripped the nation ever since.
Police mentioned suspect Perry Kouroumblis, 65, solely turned the main target of their investigation lately after DNA testing breakthroughs.
Mr Kouroumblis – who has not been charged and maintains his innocence – was detained in Italy in September. If charged, he’s anticipated to face courtroom later this week, in response to native media.
Mr Kouroumblis first got here to police consideration the week after the murders, when the then 17-year-old mentioned he had discovered a bloodied knife close to the scene in Easey Avenue, Collingwood, an inner-city suburb.
The our bodies of the highschool buddies had been found three days after they had been final seen alive. Ms Armstrong’s one-year-old son was additionally discovered within the residence, unhurt in his cot.
Each girls had been stabbed greater than a dozen instances and Ms Armstrong had been sexually assaulted, police say.
The case has lengthy drawn large curiosity – changing into the topic of main police appeals, true crime books and successful podcast. In 2017 Victoria Police supplied a A$1m (£511,800, $647,600) reward for info.
Commissioner Shane Patton described the murders as “a completely grotesque, horrific, frenzied murder” when saying the arrest of Mr Kouroumblis – a twin Greek-Australian citizen – in Rome in September.
“This was a criminal offense that struck on the coronary heart of our neighborhood – two girls in their very own residence, the place they need to have felt their most secure,” he mentioned.
Police had issued an Interpol crimson discover for Mr Kouroumblis on two prices of homicide and certainly one of rape, after he left Australia about seven years in the past.
However he was not in a position to be arrested in Greece, the place he had been residing, because the nation’s regulation requires homicide prices to be laid inside 20 years of an alleged crime.
On the time of Mr Kouroumblis’s arrest, the ladies’s households launched a press release, saying their lives had been modified “irrevocably” by the murders.
“For 2 quiet households from nation Victoria it has at all times been unimaginable to grasp the pointless and violent method wherein Suzanne and Susan died,” the assertion learn.
Addressing police, they mentioned: “For at all times giving us hope and by no means giving up, we merely say, thanks.”
