Melbourne 1977 Cold Case Solved – Arrest Shocks Community

For 47 years, the murders of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett went unsolved until now.  On the morning of January 13th, 1977, two neighbors on Easy Street in Collingwood in a Melbourne walked through the open back door of number 147. They had heard a baby crying inside for 3 days. They found a 16-month-old boy alone in his cot, dehydrated but alive.

In the bedroom next to him, his mother was dead on the floor. Her mate was face down in the hallway just outside the bedroom door. Both  women had been stabbed to death. Detectives at the scene collected semen, blood, and scrapings from under one victim’s  fingernails. In 1977, no forensic lab in Australia could turn any of it into a name.

The samples went into evidence storage and stayed there for 41 years. By the time a lab could read what was on them, the baby who had cried in that cot for 3 days was 42 years old. Their names were Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett. They had grown up together in Benalla, a country town in northeastern Victoria, and moved to Melbourne as young women.

Suzanne was 28 years old, a single mother who had given birth to her son Gregory on the Greek island of Naxos 2 years earlier. Susan was 27, a school teacher at the Collingwood Education Centre who taught arts and crafts to kids from the surrounding streets. By 1977, the two women were renting a small terrace house at 147 Easy Street in Melbourne’s inner north.

The terrace had a long central corridor with three small bedrooms off one side ending at a kitchen, a bathroom, and a small backyard that opened onto the laneway. They had signed the lease in October 1976, 10 weeks before the killings. Collingwood in the late ’70s was a working-class suburb of narrow streets and Victorian-era a houses pressed up against the factories and warehouses along the Yarra River flats.

   The houses there were thin-walled and packed close together. Back doors opened onto laneways shared with the neighbors. In the heat of summer, those doors stayed open through the night. On the evening of Monday, January 10th, Susan’s brother and his girlfriend came over for dinner. The four of them ate together and watched television in the living room while Gregory slept in his cot.

Around 9:00 p.m., the brother and his girlfriend left. The street was quiet.  Susan and Susan stayed in with the baby. The evening was warm, and the back door of the terrace was open to let the night air through. At some point after the visitors left, someone came into the house. How he got in was never determined for certain.

 The back door was unlatched. Police later found a footprint on the front window sill. There was no clear sign of forced entry at either point. He moved through the small terrace and into the rooms where the two women were. Susan Bartlett was attacked first near the front of the house. The pathologist counted 55 separate wounds on her body.

She was found face down in the hallway just outside the door to Susan’s bedroom. Investigators read the position as the moment she had tried to intervene in the attack on her friend or had been caught at the threshold trying to escape. Her hands and arms carried defensive injuries from blocking a blade.

 Susan Armstrong was killed in her bedroom. She had been stabbed 27 times. The postmortem found she had also been sexually assaulted after she was dead. In the small room next to where she lay, separated by a thin internal wall, Gregory was in his cot. He was not harmed. When investigators went through the house, the kitchen light was still on.

There were towels in the bathroom that looked like they had been used to wash up. No murder weapon was anywhere on the property. Whoever had been in the terrace that night had cleaned up before he left and walked out the way he had come in. The pathologist placed the time of death later that same night, not long after Susan’s brother and his girlfriend had said good night and walked back out to their car.

For 3 days, Gregory cried in the cot. Neighbors heard him through the thin walls. They noticed the puppy that belonged to the two women wandering the street unfed and unattended. They saw the door standing open day and night and assumed Suzanne and Susan were home but busy or had stepped out and left it that way.

Someone pinned a sign about the puppy to the front door of the terrace and it stayed there. Suzanne’s boyfriend came past the property at one point. He did not go inside. He left a note for her on the kitchen table and went home. On the morning of January 13th, two of the neighbors decided to check on the house.

 They went in through the open back door. They reached Gregory in his cot first, alive, dehydrated, distressed, but physically unharmed. Then they walked further into the terrace and saw what had happened to Suzanne and Susan. The Victoria Police Homicide Squad arrived within the hour. 16 detectives worked the case in the first months. The crime scene had yielded an extraordinary amount of biological material, semen, blood that did not belong to either victim, fibers caught on clothing and furniture, a bloody towel from the bathroom,  

 fingernail scrapings from Suzanne Armstrong’s body. None of it could be turned into a profile of a specific person. DNA testing as a forensic tool was still 7 years from being invented. The first criminal case ever solved by it was a decade away. What they did have was the canvas. Officers knocked on doors along Easy Street and the parallel streets to the north and south.

 They interviewed the women’s friends, co-workers, family, and the men known to either of them. The staff and students at Susan Bartlett School were checked one by one. Records were pulled on men with prior convictions for violence or sexual offenses across the inner north suburbs. Detectives also looked at the construction workers who had been building a property at 365 Hoddle Street directly behind 147.

One of the men interviewed in the first weeks was a crime reporter for the Melbourne tabloid Truth who had been staying at the house immediately next door to number 147 on the night of the killings. He was checked and detectives moved on. No witness on the street had heard or seen anything useful despite the thin walls of the terraces.

The press coverage was constant. Helen Thomas was a cub reporter at The Age newspaper who arrived on Easy Street the morning the bodies were found. She later wrote that no single crime in her career had hit the city the way this one did. The Herald and The Sun ran the story across their front pages for weeks.

 The case was the subject of public appeals on television and radio. A year after the murders in 1978, a reward of $50,000 was offered for information leading to a conviction. It produced tips. None of them led to an arrest. By the end of the first year, the case had generated a list of more than 100 persons of interest.

Detectives moved from one name to the next eliminating each one against the timeline of the night of January 10th. Without a way to read the biological samples, the investigation had no filter. Every man on the list could be questioned, but none of them could be ruled in or ruled out by what had been left on the bedroom floor.

The case ran hot through the first half of 1977 and began to cool by the end of the year. Detectives transferred and retired. New officers came into the homicide squad and inherited the file. Each generation read through the original interview notes, looked at the same crime scene photographs, and asked the same question, had the science caught up yet? Names kept getting added as new tips came in, but the answer was always the same.

In 2011, a senior detective named Ron Iddles quietly reopened the file. Iddles was the most experienced cold case investigator in Victoria Police with a homicide conviction rate of 99% across more than 300 cases. He had joined the force as a young constable in 1972, spent 25 years in the homicide squad, and worked the cases other officers had written off as unsolvable.

The press had taken to calling him Australia’s greatest detective. He took the file into the cold case unit and started over. In 2017, on the 40th anniversary of the murders, Victoria Police announced a reward of $1 million for information leading to a conviction. By that point, whoever had been in the terrace that night had been free for as long as either woman had ever been alive.

The reward generated fresh media coverage, but produced no confession and no new witness. What it did signal was that the resources were available to push the case through a forensic process the original investigators had never had. Gregory Armstrong was 16 months old when his mother was killed in the next room.

He was taken from the house on the day the neighbors found him and was raised in Queensland by Suzanne’s younger sister. She spent the next four decades publicly advocating for the case to be solved, giving interviews on the anniversaries, sitting for documentaries, making sure her sister’s name stayed in the news.

Gregory had been too young to remember any of it. He grew up known as the boy in the cot. Anniversaries, podcasts, news features on the unsolved double murder in Collingwood kept coming back to him. By the time the case finally produced an arrest in 2024, Gregory was 49 years old. In 2018, 41 years after the the Victoria Police sent the archived samples in for a new round of DEA testing.

New methods could work with degraded material that earlier techniques would have dismissed as unusable. The samples had been kept sealed through changes of building, changes of laboratory, and changes of government. Their chain of custody had survived four decades. The lab pulled a full male DNA profile from the semen collected at autopsy, the blood on the towel, and the scrapings from underneath Suzanne Armstrong’s fingernails.

 All of the biological material came from the same man. The profile did not match anyone in the national DNA database. The man who had been inside 147 Easy Street on the night of January 10th, 1977, had never been arrested for an offense serious enough in Australia to put his DNA on file. Whoever he was, he had walked out of the terrace and stayed out of the system.

But what the profile gave the cold case team was a filter. For 41 years, the persons of interest list had been a list of names without a test. Now, there was a test. Detectives worked back through the names methodically, comparing each man’s DNA to the crime scene profile. Some came through voluntary cooperation.

 Some came through court orders. Each one was either a match or it was not. His name was Periklis Corumblis. He went by Perry. Corumblis was 17 years old on the night of January 10th, 1977. He lived with his family on Bendigo Street in Collingwood, less than 300 m from 147 Easy Street. He was a student at the Collingwood Education Centre, the same school where Susan Bartlett taught arts and crafts.

Four days after the murders, a young constable pulled over a 1968 Holden on a road nearby. He had flagged the teenage driver down at the side of the road in what he later described as a random traffic stop. In the boot of the car, the constable found a knife in a scabbard with what appeared to be traces of blood on it.

The driver was Perry Karumblis. He told the officer he had picked it up off the railway tracks not far away. The constable  took the weapon into evidence and let the boy go home. The constable’s name was Ron on Eddles. He was 22 years old in 1977, in his fifth year on the force, working uniform on the streets of Melbourne’s inner north.

He filed his report and went on with his shift. The connection to Easy Street was not made for another 34 years. Months later, when the inquest into the murders of Armstrong and Bartlett was scheduled, Karumblis could not be found to testify. He had been facing unrelated charges at the time and had simply disappeared.

Around the same period, his parents sold the family home on Bendigo Street and eventually moved back to Greece. Their son went with them for a time before slipping back into Victoria years later. The knife went into a storage box with the rest of the physical items connected to the case. It stayed there for the next 48 years.

When Eddles reopened the Easy Street file in 2011, the case went back to the man who had pulled over that 17-year-old in 1977. He was now running the cold case homicide division, the senior detective in charge of finding out who killed Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett. In 2017, as part of the reopened investigation, the cold case team asked Karumblis for a DNA sample.

 According to the prosecution at the 2025 committal hearing, he provided one voluntarily. 4 months later, he boarded a plane to Greece. He had a Greek passport and dual citizenship, and his mother was unwell in the family’s home country. He did not come back for the next 7 years. In 2018, samples connected to Karumblis, including biological material from his 1968 Holden, were sent back to the forensic laboratory in Melbourne.

The prosecution alleges that the new analysis matched the male DNA recovered from inside 147 Easy Street. The court heard that the DNA on the swabs from Suzanne Armstrong’s body was 650 million times more likely to have come from Corumblas than from any other person in the population. Corumblas has denied the charges.

 His legal team has argued the DNA evidence was contaminated through decades of imperfect storage and handling and should not be accepted at trial. On September 19th, 2024, Italian authorities detained a 65-year-old man at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci Fiumicino Airport. He was traveling on a Greek passport and had been flagged on an Australian international arrest warrant.

The intercept had been arranged because Greek law would not have allowed his arrest while he remained inside Greece. Investigators had been waiting for him to leave the country. He was taken into custody at the terminal and held at Rome’s Regina Coeli prison while Italian courts handled the extradition. Days later, in front of a court in Rome, Corumblas told the judge he was innocent and did not intend to contest the extradition request.

Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton announced the arrest at a press conference back in Melbourne. “This was a crime that struck at the heart of our community,” Patton said. “Two women in their own home where they should have felt their safest.” Patton described the arrest as an important breakthrough but warned there was still some way to go.

“This was Victoria’s most serious and longest-running cold case ever solved,” he said. “There was simply no expiry date on crimes as brutal as this one.” He spoke directly to the Armstrong and Bartlett families. “I hope this arrest brings you closer to the answers you so richly deserve and have waited so long for,” he said.

The Armstrong and Bartlett families released a joint written statement through the police department. For two quiet families from country Victoria, they said, “It has always been impossible to comprehend the needless and violent manner in which Suzanne and Susan died. The perseverance and dedication required to achieve the result today is something to truly behold.

For always giving us hope and never giving up, we simply say, thank you.” On December 3rd, 2024, Karunaratne was arrived back in Melbourne under police escort. He was taken directly to the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court and charged with the murders of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett, and with the sexual assault of Armstrong.

 He pleaded not guilty to all charges. His defense team is led by Bill Doogue, one of the senior criminal lawyers in the state. A committal hearing began on October 29th, 2025. Over 6 days, the prosecution called 19 witnesses. Ron Iddles, by then retired after 43 years on the force, took the stand and gave evidence about the traffic stop he had run in January 1977.

Former Detective Stuart Bateson and Peter Hiscock testified about earlier cold case reviews. Bateson, who had taken over the file between 1997 and 2001, told the court he had chipped away at it while mostly tied up with Melbourne’s gangland wars. He had used the recovered semen to eliminate other suspects by collecting fresh blood samples for comparison.

Karunaratne had not come up in that period. Terry Purton, another retired officer who had worked at the original crime scene, described the conditions inside the terrace that morning. Forensic pathologist David Ranson told the court the knife could not be ruled in or ruled out as the murder weapon. The defense team challenged the handling of the physical material across 48 years of storage.

 Retired officers admitted they had not worn gloves at the scene in 1977. One of them testified that gloves had been in the standard kit but had not been used. Another said the squad simply did not have them in those days. The samples had been moved across multiple sites over the decades and at one point had been transported in the boot of a police car.

 Dermot Dan KC, the senior defense barrister, described the forensic material as explosive and asked Magistrate Brett Sonnet to exclude the DNA from any future trial. The magistrate rejected that application. At the close of the hearing, Karumblas was ordered to stand trial in the Supreme Court of Victoria for the murders. The sexual assault charge was dismissed at committal on evidentiary grounds.

A trial date has not been set. A 16-month-old boy who cried in his cot for 3 days while his mother lay dead in the next room, blood, a towel, and scrapings from under her fingernails sat in evidence storage for 41 years before a lab could read what was on them. The boy who had been in that cot turned 50 the year his mother’s name went back into a Melbourne courtroom.

The man accused of putting her there was arrested coming out of Greece. A constable had taken a knife from the boot of his car 4 days after she died. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More solved cases in the playlist.