Shane was last seen in the NSW country town of Wyndham in 2002.
June 17, 2007 - The Age
TWICE in the winter of 1969, a little boy looked deep into the eyes of a young man called Derek Percy and got lost there forever.
The first time, that crisp Sunday in July, Shane Spiller was 11 and strolling down a dirt track at Warneet, on Westernport Bay, with his friend, Yvonne Tuohy. When they got to the beach at the end of the trail, they were going to make a little fire of driftwood and have a picnic lunch.
But Percy got there first. He grabbed 12-year-old Yvonne and pressed a red dagger to her neck. He told Shane to come, too, but the boy knew better than that. In his belt he had a small hatchet that he'd brought to chop firewood and now he waved it at the man and began backing away.
"Come back or he'll cut my throat," begged Yvonne. Instead, Shane sprinted 200 metres through the tea-tree scrub yelling for help. As he got to the road, he saw Percy driving away. He had Yvonne wrapped in a blanket.
The second time was at Russell Street police headquarters. Shane had been able to describe the car, an orange station wagon, and gave detectives a drawing of a sticker he'd seen on its rear window. It was a Royal Australian Navy insignia and pointed the police to the nearby base at HMAS Cerberus. They found Percy in the laundry, trying to wash Yvonne's blood from his clothes.
He took them to Fisheries Road, Devon Meadows, where he'd left her under some bushes. He had tied her wrists behind her, stuffed a balled cloth in her mouth, strangled her and mutilated her body and throat with long, deep cuts.
But now the detectives needed Shane to look into those killer's eyes again. They put him in a room where the 21-year-old naval rating with the long, narrow face had been placed in a line-up. "I had to pick him," he recalled later. "I had to walk up and point right at his nose."
After 30 years, he still shuddered: "The look he gave me ?"
The police were very pleased with their young witness. They had a sketch artist do his portrait and gave him a show bag of gifts. The newspaper photographers were happy, too. They'd captured a terrific image of the boy in his army-style jacket, epaulets and turtle-neck jumper, holding his steel tomahawk in both hands, his wide hazel eyes staring straight down the lens.
"And for all the world," remembers former police victim liaison officer Robert Read, "that was the end of Shane Spiller."
The world had a lot to distract it that day. On the moon, Neil Armstrong had taken a small step on to the Sea of Tranquility. But, as Read now points out, that was a word that would never again apply to Shane Spiller: "That little boy was traumatised for life by Derek Percy and by what he'd seen."
At his trial a year later, Percy was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity and sent to prison for an indefinite term. He is still there. Shane went home to Armadale and tried to resume his life. "He went back to school after the holiday and seemed to be doing all right," says lawyer Michael Clark. "The effects didn't really catch up to him until he was about 14 or 15."
From the beginning, he had trouble sleeping and grew afraid of the dark. His parents had been advised that he'd get over it and not to mollycoddle him. These were the days before trauma counselling, says Clark. "Back then, if you saw something you didn't like you bit your tongue and took it like a man. He wasn't able to do that."
He got lost in guilt, loneliness and fear and began drinking at 14. "He'd been a pretty good student but very quickly his results went from good to pathetic, he fell out with his parents, left school and basically went walkabout. From that time on, he was a wandering, lost soul."
One day, years later, and by then a heavy drinker and drug user, Spiller washed up in the little New South Wales village of Wyndham, in the hills and bush 30 kilometres west of Merimbula. It must have seemed the perfect place to escape to. The trouble was, he took Derek Percy with him.
WYNDHAM is a pub, a general store and a couple of dozen modest houses tucked into the dips and folds of the Mount Darragh ridgeline, between Whipstick and Rocky Hall. In the 1860s, it was gold country but now yields mainly cattle and timber, with some sidelining in small-plot cannabis plantations hidden in the surrounding national park.
Ever since he suddenly disappeared on Monday, September 9, 2002, what might have happened to skinny Shane Spiller has exercised the minds ? and imaginations ? of Wyndham. "It's a real mystery. Everyone still talks about it," says general store owner Bryan Hunter, the last person to see him alive.
That morning, Spiller had walked to the store from his two-bedroom shack around the corner to pick up his mail. A few days later, when worried neighbours broke into his house, they found his boots in the middle of the living room, dinner set for two on the table, his wallet, and his medications untouched. His motorcycle was locked in his shed. They called the police and joined in the search for him, on motorbikes and horses, checking old mine shafts and lookouts. Every so often they still go out looking, but have never found him.
What got him in the end, they reckon, was bad company. He'd become involved with "a bullshit scene" of morphine abusers, junkies and thieves. One in particular, who'd arrived not long out of prison, scared people: "A bad egg," says one. "Black, empty eyes," says another. When he first came to the pub looking for Stick, the barmaid told her boss: "If ever I've seen evil, it's just walked in to the bar."
For the second time in his life, Spiller had come too close to a killer. "We've bandied this about for years," says Tony Boller. "Somebody disappeared him, that's for sure." But however it ended, they insist, Derek Percy had already stolen Spiller's life all those years ago.
OVER 20 years, Robert Read has looked into the eyes of thousands of victims of violence. As head of the Victoria Police victim advisory unit, he has counselled survivors of rape, assault and armed robbery and families who have lost loved ones to murder and road toll. But in his scrapbook of hard memories, Spiller has a special place.
They first met in 1998, when he began helping Spiller seek criminal injuries compensation. Read liked the "loveable sort of bloke" from the start. "He was a knockabout sort of fella, a wild and woolly little character, very thin, with this big Ned Kelly beard. There wasn't much of him, probably more beard than anything. He was quintessentially a little Aussie bloke from the bush. But that was the facade. Underneath that he was a shattered individual and Derek Percy still controlled him. He was vulnerable and he was extremely fearful. Beneath the face of Shane Spiller lived a deep and dark cesspool of emotions."
And they were the baggage he carried when he drifted into Wyndham in the late 1980s. Next-door neighbour Andy Morris believes that from the time of his fatal beach holiday, Spiller had never felt safe again. Friends were asked to note the number plates of cars parked outside his home; he cut a trapdoor into his living room floor; and he slept with a baseball bat by his bed. He had become convinced that Percy would come after him or had put out a contract on his life.
"He was the most paranoid person I've ever met," he says. "Shane suffered all his life with post-traumatic stress disorder. There was this overwhelming dark cloud over his life and he was basically self-medicating with drugs and alcohol."