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SYDNEY, Australia — A 65-year-old man has been arrested in Rome over the “horrific, frenzied” 1977 homicide of two ladies of their dwelling in Melbourne, Australian police stated Saturday.
The our bodies of Suzanne Armstrong, 27, and Susan Bartlett, 28, have been found at their home in Easey Avenue, Melbourne, on January 13, 1977, with a number of stab wounds.
Armstrong had been raped. Her then 16-month-old son was discovered unhurt in his cot.
The ladies had final been seen alive three days earlier.
“It was a fully ugly, horrific, frenzied murder – a number of stabbings,” Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton advised a information convention.
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He described the 47-year-old crime, often known as the Easey Avenue murders, because the state’s longest and most critical chilly case.
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The suspect, a twin Greek-Australian citizen, had been residing in Greece the place he was protected by the nation’s statute of limitations, Patton stated.
Police waited for him to go away the nation, the chief commissioner added, and he was lastly arrested Thursday, September 19, within the Italian capital’s Fiumicino airport beneath an Interpol pink discover.
Australia will launch extradition procedures, he stated.
Police had been helped by “technological advances” over time, Patton stated.
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In 2017, they supplied an Aus$1 million (US$680,000) reward for info resulting in an arrest and conviction, he stated, after new info had come to mild.
He declined to present extra particulars of the investigation.
A report in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper, which police didn’t affirm, stated police had determined to examine the DNA of all 131 folks named within the authentic police file.
The suspect was on that listing and had agreed to endure a DNA take a look at however as a substitute fled to Greece in 2017, the paper reported.
He was linked to the crime by the DNA of an in depth relative, it stated.
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In line with The Age, the suspect had been stopped and searched on the night time of the murders by native police who discovered a big knife on him – three days earlier than the our bodies have been found.
It’s “understood” that the person – then a young person – was not interviewed in regards to the killings on the time as police centered on different suspects, the paper stated.
A detective senior sergeant working the investigation since 2015 broke the information of the suspect’s arrest to the victims’ households on Saturday morning (September 21), Patton stated.
The households have been “emotional, speechless, overwhelmed, however appreciative that they hadn’t been forgotten,” he stated.
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“There may be merely no expiry date on crimes which might be as brutal as this. I believe that’s borne out right here immediately.”
