Vivienne and Fergus fought, and Vivienne had stabbed her husband with a broken wine glass, then taken him to the hospital to get stitched up. Ian Cairns, who was married to Fergus’ 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 Don and Ian, the family hadn’t known about this until the babysitter rang them earlier that morning to ask what she should do with the children since she had to go to work. It was then that they realised that both Vivienne and the family’s Toyota Land Cruiser were missing.
And so, right from the get-go, the suggestion was that Vivienne rang the babysitter in the middle of the night, then drove out to Beth’s place and killed her. And there was something the Homicide detectives were about to discover that would add weight to that theory.
In the bedroom of the dead woman, Cliff Ashe and Jack McFayden had lifted the doona just enough to see the vicious wounds to Beth’s throat. It wasn’t until Rory O’Connor, and Garry Hunter lifted the doona off completely that they saw something they could hardly fathom.
Carved deeply and clearly into Beth’s chest and abdomen, was a giant letter ‘A’.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter, written in 1850, told the story of a woman called Hester Prynne who was 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.
Did the A carved into Beth’s chest brand her an adulteress?
And if that was the case, who would have more reason to do so than Vivienne Cameron?
It was the job of crime scene examiners Sergeant Hughie Peters and Senior Constable Brian Gamble to examine the house for evidence. While 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.
Gamble and Peters were told 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. This meant two things – there could be a possible offender to link to the scene, and also, there was a second scene they would have to examine – the Camerons’ farmhouse where the wine glass attack had taken place.
Crime scene examination was painstaking work and while it was being carried out, the body had to 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.
Beth’s body was the starting point. She was photographed from different angles while Gamble made sketches of her bedroom and noted the position of the beds and 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.
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 dark-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.
Beth still had her underpants on which suggested the attack did not include rape.
Gamble was interested in the circular smears of dried blood on Beth’s legs. Did the killer rub their 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. One of her front teeth had been knocked out in the attack; Gamble found it on the carpet next to the body. While this kind of damage might have been part of a frenzied attack, there was a possibility 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 logged for examination at the Forensic Science Laboratory. After many hours of meticulous examination, he would collect 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. It looked like Beth either got out of bed or was dragged out, and the attack continued on the floor. 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 bedroom had been disturbed. Even the small lamp next to Beth’s bed was still upright.
Beth died defending herself. 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 her in a futile attempt to ward off the knife, and a particularly nasty slice in the webbing of her right thumb suggested she had tried to grab the knife to stop it.
After he’d finished processing the bedroom, Gamble continued his work in the rest of the house. It looked like the doona that covered the body 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 killer 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 the killer had already been inside the house. And perhaps in Beth’s bedroom. Most homicide victims are killed by people they know. Had she 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 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 would work well into the night. An eerie quiet settled over the scene as darkness fell on the lonely farmhouse.
While Gamble and Peters examined the crime scene, the Homicide detectives began canvassing the neighbours. Beth’s closest neighbour remembered seeing a car drive up McFees Road the previous evening at 7.50pm which turned into Beth’s driveway and had 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.
Detectives O’Connor and Hunter considered that piece of information. 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
