Elizabeth Stevens

On Saturday, June 12, 1993, the partially-clothed body of 18-year-old student Elizabeth Stevens was found in Lloyd Park on the Cranbourne Road, Langwarrin, a short drive from Frankston. The teenager had been reported missing the previous evening by her uncle and aunt whom she was staying with.

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Naked from the waist up, Elizabeth Stevens had had her throat cut, there were six deep knife wounds to her chest, four deep cuts running from her breast to her navel and four more running at right angles forming a macabre criss-cross pattern on her abdomen. Elizabeth Stevens' face had several cuts and abrasions and her nose was swollen indicating that it had been broken. Her bra was up around her neck. A post-mortem would reveal that she hadn't been sexually assaulted.

Life-sized mannequin of Elizabeth Stevens

The killing was as senseless as it was brutal. Elizabeth didn't have an enemy in the world. The attack had to be that of a random killer or perhaps a rape gone wrong. Police mounted a huge search for the killer. They used a life-sized mannequin at a roadblock at the bus stop where Elizabeth Stevens was last seen in the hope that someone may recognize her and hopefully the person she may have been with.

They knocked on every door in the district and questioned bus drivers and passengers who were on Elizabeth Stevens' last known bus ride. They checked out every known library in the vicinity of where she was last known to have been. It all amounted to nothing.

On the evening of July 8, 1993, 41-year-old bank clerk Roszsa Toth was making her way home from work to Seaford in the Frankston district when she was violently attacked by a man who said he had a gun and tried to drag her into a nearby nature reserve.

Mrs. Toth put up a fight for her life during which the man pulled out clumps of her hair and she bit his fingers to the bone on several occasions. She eventually fought the man off and with torn stockings and trousers and no shoes she managed to hail down a passing car as her assailant fled into the night. Roszsa Toth had little doubt that had she not resisted so strongly she would have most definitely been murdered.

Mrs. Toth rang the police who were at the scene of the assault within minutes. They found nothing. Later that same evening 22-year-old Debbie Fream who had given birth to a son, Jake, 12 days earlier, went missing after she drove to her local store at Seaford to pick up a bottle of milk while in the middle of preparing dinner.

Four days later her body was found by a farmer in one of his paddocks at nearby Carrum Downs. Debbie Fream had been stabbed about the neck, head, chest and arms 24 times. She had also been strangled. She had not been sexually assaulted.

The attack of Roszsa Toth, which had been considered a purse snatching gone horribly wrong, was now considered to be the work of the same killer of Elizabeth Stevens and Debbie Fream. There was a madman on the loose in Frankston.

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