Sydney 47 Years Cold Case Where the Killer Was Never Charged

In 1980, a man was arrested in Enour in Sydney’s Inner West for smashing a window, a door, and a jukebox inside a shop. It was minor property damage, the most ordinary morning’s work a suburban police station does. He was charged, processed, and printed the way anybody is.

 A set of his fingerprints and palm prints went into the New South Wales police system. Nobody thought anything of it. Nobody had any reason to. He paid whatever the court asked and went home. Four years earlier, a 44 year old man had been stabbed 35 times in his own flat a few suburbs away and left on the kitchen floor for 5 days.

 A palm print in his blood was on the wall above him. That print was already in the system. Both halves of the answer sat in the same building. Nobody put them together for another 43 years. This is how they finally nicked the killer. Ernest Head was found on the 22nd of June 1976. He had been dead since the evening of the 17th.

 5 days had gone by in a top floor flat at number 49 Groven Crescent in Summer Hill with the door shut and nobody going in. When police did go in, they found him on the kitchen floor. He was naked, face down, his head turned to one side. There was a large pool of blood around him and there was a trail of blood coming from the bedroom.

 Nobody reported him missing in that time. He lived alone. he kept to himself and the nature of the life he had built meant there were not many people who would have expected to hear from him on a given Friday. 5 days matters forensically. It matters for what a pathologist can establish about time of death, for what a body can still say, and for how much a flat with the windows shut in June does to physical evidence.

It also matters in a plainer way. [music] Ernest Head lay on his own kitchen floor for 5 days before anybody came looking in a building with other people living in it. Ernest Allen Head was born in Malaysia on the 27th of February 1932 and came to Australia in 1960. By the time he died, he was 44 and living alone in Summer Hill, a quiet part of Sydney’s inner west between Ashefield and Lewisham.

The people who knew him described him with the same three words over and over. He was quiet, private, and good-natured. Ernest was homosexual. In New South Wales in 1976, that was still a criminal offense, and it would remain one for another 8 years. Every part of his life that involved other men was a part he had to keep off the record, out of conversations at work, and away from anybody who might use it against him.

 That is not a small thing to live with. And it shaped where a man like Ernest could go and who he could tell. His social life ran through places that understood the arrangement. He had spent time around the Commonwealth military forces in Malaysia before he immigrated. He had family and friends in Singapore.

 In Sydney, he was known at the Mandarin Club. He lived carefully, and the care he took is part of why the man who killed him was so hard to find. An investigation into his death was up against something structural. The people most likely to know who Ernest had been seeing were people who could be charged for the same conduct if they said so.

Anybody who had been in that flat had a reason not to volunteer it. A man who wanted to be interviewed about his private life was a man risking a criminal record. That’s not a small obstacle. It’s the difference between a witness pool and a wall of silence. And it was created by the law itself. Subscribe so you don’t miss how one fingerprint expert finally answered a 47year-old question.

 The crime scene told investigators the order of events. Ernest was lying in bed when the attack started. He got up and he ran down the hallway away from the bedroom toward the front of the flat and the blood on the floor traces the whole route. He made it to the kitchen. The flat had one way out and it was past the man with the knife.

Running to the kitchen wasn’t an escape. It was the last place left to go. That is where it finished. He was stabbed 35 times to the chest, the face, the back, and the abdomen, and to his left leg, his arm, and his buttock. The word the investigators used was frenzied. 35 wounds is not a number that comes from a struggle over property.

 It takes time and it takes proximity. Killing somebody can be over in seconds. What happened in that kitchen was a decision made repeatedly, blow after blow, by a person who could have stopped at any point and kept going long after Earnest Head had stopped being able to fight back. The inquiry put one more thing on the record about that flat.

Things were missing from it. A watch, a television, a cassette recorder, a radio, jewelry. So, somebody killed a man in his own home with extraordinary violence and then walked around the flat collecting his belongings. That doesn’t resolve the motive. It complicates it. A robbery that goes wrong doesn’t usually produce 35 wounds.

 And a killing driven by rage doesn’t usually end with somebody calmly working out which appliances are worth carrying. Both things happened in that flat on the same night. Forensic examination also indicated that Ernest had had sex before he died and neighbors in the building had heard something that night. An argument. A second male voice.

 That is the outline of the evening. Ernest let somebody into his flat. There was a period of time when nothing was wrong. Then there was an argument loud enough for the neighbors to hear through the walls. And then a man who had been in bed was running down his own hallway. In the kitchen on the western wall, directly above where Ernest’s body was lying, there was a palm print.

 It was in his blood. Somebody had put a hand flat against that wall while there was fresh blood on it, hard enough and clean enough to leave the ridge detail of a human palm. The forensic team lifted it and photographed it. In the police assessment written up years later, the language is as plain as police language gets.

 It is highly likely that the palm print in blood was left by the person responsible for the murder of Ernest Allen Head. That was the case. Not a witness, not a name, not a motive anybody could prove. One handprint on a kitchen wall in the victim’s own blood left by a man who had been standing over him. A palm print is in one sense better evidence than a fingerprint.

 There is more of it. The ridge detail across a palm gives an examiner far more points of comparison than a fingertip does. And a print laid down in blood tends to be sharper than one left in sweat and oil. But it comes with the same fatal limitation as every print. And it is the limitation this entire case turns on.

 A print doesn’t identify anybody. It establishes that a mark and a record came from the same hand and nothing more. If the record doesn’t exist, the mark is a photograph of nothing. The 1976 investigation was not a token effort. Detectives went through Summer Hill and the streets around it. They spoke to more than a hundred people.

They took statements from neighbors, from friends, from anybody who might have seen a man come or go from number 49 in the days around the 17th. And they went after the print properly. Approximately 200 sets of elimination prints were submitted and examined. That means 200 people who had a legitimate reason to have been in that flat or near it, printed and cleared one by one.

The point of it is to narrow the mark on the wall down to somebody who had no business being there. Every one of them was excluded. Not one of the 200 was the person who had put a hand on that wall, which meant detectives had proved a negative 200 times [music] and were no closer than when they started.

 That number says something about how seriously the print was taken. 200 sets is not a formality. Somebody had to identify each of those people, find them, print them, then sit and compare 10 fingers and two palms against a mark on a wall 200 times. It was the right work. It just couldn’t reach the one man it needed to reach because in 1976 he was not a name anybody in Summer Hill would have thought to give them.

 The print was checked against the police fingerprint database. In 1976 that meant a trained examiner comparing ridge detail by eye against whatever records the filing system held. No identification. Whoever had put his hand on that wall had never been fingerprinted by any police force in New South Wales.

 And in 1976, that was the end of the road. Four years later, in a shop in Enour, a man put a window and a jukebox through. It wasn’t a serious crime, just the sort of matter that goes through a local court and is finished in a morning. It was also a conviction, and that is the only part that matters here. And from that morning onward, he was on file.

 The man whose palm was on that kitchen wall now existed inside the system as a set of inked cards with a name attached. He would later serve a six-year prison sentence on drug charges. More contact with the system. More records. More opportunities for somebody at some point to run one comparison. The crime scene print was in the system.

 His prints were in the system. Nothing happened. The reason is not simple incompetence. For most of that period, comparison ran in one direction only. Police had a suspect [music] and they compared that man’s prints against the marks from a scene. That worked. What did not happen and could not happen at scale before the technology existed was the reverse.

Taking every unidentified mark from every unsolved crime in the state and running it automatically against every new set of prints coming through the door. Which means that in 1980, nobody was doing anything wrong by failing to make the connection. The mark from Ernest Head’s Kitchen and the cards taken from the man in Enour simply sat in the same institution unconnected because nothing in that institution was built to connect them.

 The case didn’t disappear. Files like this one get reviewed, and Earnest Heads was more than once across the decades that followed. In 2005, almost 30 years after the murder, the file was worked again as major crime case 76, stroke 48. The palm print was submitted once more. It came back unidentified. By 2005, the technology had changed completely.

 Manual comparison had given way to automated systems that could scan a mark against enormous numbers of records in the time it used to take an examiner to check a handful. The national fingerprint database existed. The search was run. It still came back with nothing. An automated search of a national database run in 2005 against a man whose prints had been sitting in the New South Wales system for 25 years.

 And the [music] answer was no match. Ernest Head’s file went back on the shelf for another 18 years after that. Subscribe so you don’t miss the commission that finally forced someone to look at that print one more time. Meanwhile, the rest of the evidence was disappearing. Hair, saliva, the material the inquiry would later describe as high yield DNI sources, meaning the exhibits that modern testing could have done the most with.

 Over the decades of storage and transfers and reorganizations, they were lost. That is the cruelty of the timeline. The one piece of evidence that survived everything was the mark on the wall, and it was the one piece a database kept saying no to. Hair and saliva in 1976 were close to useless because nobody could read DNA from them. By the 1990s, they would have been the most valuable objects in the entire file.

 The exhibits that were worthless when they were collected became priceless while sitting in storage, and then they were gone before anybody could use them. Ernest Head’s case became one of dozens from that era with the same shape. A homosexual man killed in circumstances that suggested his identity had something to do with it. An investigation that produced nothing and decades of silence afterwards.

 Sydney in the 1970s and 1980s had a sustained problem with violence against homosexual men. And for a long time, the scale of it was not officially acknowledged. Men were assaulted in parks, on beats, in their homes. Some of them died. A number of those deaths were recorded as accidents or suicides or misadventure, and the files were closed.

 Ernest’s case was never written off like that. Nobody suggested he fell or jumped, but it went into the same drawer as the others, and it stayed there for the same reason. Nothing about it was ever going to move unless somebody outside the system made it move. In 2022, the New South Wales government established the Special Commission of Inquiry into LG GBTIQ hate crimes.

 The commissioner was Justice John Sakar. The brief was to re-examine suspected hate motivated deaths in New South Wales between 1970 and 2010, including cases where there were credible concerns that the original police investigations had been inadequate or shaped by the attitudes of their time. It had powers no cold case review normally has.

 Witnesses could be compelled, documents subpoenaed, and new forensic work ordered on old evidence. The inquiry ran for 2 years and worked through dozens of deaths, some of which had never been treated as suspicious at all. That last power is the one that mattered for Earnest Head. A commission of inquiry can walk into a police forensic unit and ask for a specific exhibit to be looked at.

 Again, it doesn’t have to justify it against a case load or wait for a fresh lead or explain why this file and not another one. It can simply require the work to be done. Nothing about the science had changed in the months before that request. No new technique had been invented. What changed was that somebody with the authority to insist finally asked for the work to be done and had the standing to make it happen.

Ernest Head’s death was one of the cases it took. It was heard as a documentary tender case, which means council assisting laid the entire evidentiary record in front of the commissioner and made a submission about what he should find. By then, the file was 46 years old, and nobody who had worked the original investigation was still on the job.

 In 2023, the inquiry asked for the palm print to be examined again. [music] The work was done by a senior crime scene officer named Kate Reed, a fingerprint expert at fingerprint operations in Paramata. The exhibit was cataloged as forensic case 76 stroke 4365 and the mark itself carried the reference B1. She examined it using ACEV, which is the standard methodology for fingerprint comparison anywhere in the world.

analyze the mark, compare it against a candidate evaluate the agreement, and then have a second qualified examiner verify the whole thing independently. That verification step exists because fingerprint identification has been wrong before and badly. It’s a discipline that depends on human judgment about ridge detail, [music] and it has produced misidentification serious enough to send innocent people to prison.

 The modern process is built around the assumption that one expert’s opinion on its own isn’t enough. On the 30th of May 2023, she issued her certificate. She provided a further statement on the 20th of June answering additional questions from the crown solicitor acting for the inquiry. The palm print was identified. Not a partial and not a probability, but an identification.

Engim. He was born in Turkey and came to Australia in 1972, 4 years before Ernest Head was killed. He was young when he arrived and he built a life here which is the ordinary story of a great many people who came to Sydney in that decade. Council assisting the inquiry, Kathleen Heath, told the hearing that Simse had relatives living in the same street as Ernest in the early 1970s, which raised the possibility that the two men had been in contact with each other.

 That stopped short of saying they knew each other. It says there was a reason their paths could have crossed on a short residential street in the inner west in the years before 1976. Groven a cresant isn’t a thorough affair. It is a curved street of flats and terraces where the same faces go past the same windows.

 His prince had been in the system since the Enore conviction in 1980. The 6-year drug sentence came later. He was arrested in that time, convicted twice, printed, imprisoned, and released. The New South Wales criminal justice system processed him more than once, and every single time it did, the thing that would have identified him went with him.

 He left Australia in 1994, 18 years after Ernest Head was killed, and 14 years after his own prince went onto the file that could have named him, and in 1999 in Turkey, Enen Simse took his own life. By then he had been out of the country for 5 years. Nobody had ever questioned him about Ernest Head.

 No charge was ever laid and he never gave anybody a single word of explanation about the night of the 17th of June 1976. He died 24 years before a fingerprint expert in Paramata matched his palm to a wall in Summer Hill. The inquiry heard the case on the 10th of October 2023. Kathleen Heath put the submission to the commissioner in careful language.

 The presence of Sims palm print in blood on the kitchen wall above Ernest Head’s body powerfully indicated that Simse was at least involved in what happened in that flat. At least involved. That is as far as the evidence goes. A print proves presence. It proves that a man’s hand was on that wall while Ernest’s blood was still wet on it.

 It doesn’t prove on its own that the same hand held the knife or that he was alone in the flat or what was said before the argument the neighbors heard. And Simse never had the chance to answer any of it. There is only a handprint and a name that arrived 24 years after the man himself was gone. What it does do is answer the question that 47 years of policing could not.

Somebody was in that kitchen. Here is his name. And there’s a second thing the identification does which has nothing to do with courts and everything to do with the people who knew him for half a century. The possibilities in this case were unlimited. It could have been a stranger.

 It could have been somebody Ernest had known for years. It could have been anyone in a city of millions. That kind of open question does something to the people left behind. And closing it is worth something even when nobody can be punished. The commission also considered whether Ernest’s death was motivated by bias. The circumstances it was weighing are the ones on the record.

 A homosexual man attacked in his own home in an era when his private life was a criminal offense with a level of violence that went far past what killing required. The commission’s own remitt, its title, and its findings use the term gay hate, and that is the language of the official record. The commission delivered its findings in December 2023.

Ernest’s case sat inside a much larger conclusion about how deaths like his had been handled in New South Wales across four decades and about what it cost the people whose files were the ones that never moved. There was a palm print on a kitchen wall in Summer Hill in the blood of a quiet, private, good-natured man.

It was there from the night he died. It never moved and it never faded. In 1976, somebody doing their job properly photographed it, and that photograph survived every institutional change of the next five decades. From 1980, the prince that matched it were in the same police system taken from a man convicted of breaking a jukebox.

 Both of them sat there while he finished his sentence, while he lived in Australia for another 14 years. while he left the country [music] and while he died on the other side of the world. It took a commission of inquiry and one request for a re-examination of a single exhibit to finally ask the question that made the wall answer.

 Ernest Head was 44 years old and he had spent his adult life being careful about who he told. The man whose hand was on that wall walked away from that flat and lived another 23 years. If this case stayed with you, leave your thoughts in the comments. More cases in the