In the late summer of 1984, in Australia, there would be a shocking double murder in a Victoria suburb which remains one of the best-known unsolved homicides in the country.
Thirty-five-year-old nurse and law student Margaret Tapp was a beautiful and socially popular young woman, and apparently had no qualms about getting attention from married men. In fact, the home in Ferntree Gully that she shared with her nine-year-old daughter Seana had been purchased for her by a married doctor she had dated for some time. After the doctor’s death in 1983, his widow had attempted to wrestle ownership of the property away from Margaret, though the court only deigned to give her half, after which Margaret subsequently purchased the widow’s portion.
On August 8th, 1984, Margaret had made a date with a new suitor named Jim Rollins; the pair of them were going to the opera. But when he arrived to pick her up at about six o’clock that evening, he became alarmed when there was no answer to his knocks, and suspicious that the home was completely dark. The back door was unlocked, so he let himself in.
Peering into Margaret’s bedroom, Jim saw what at first appeared to be his date, tucked into her bed asleep. As he drew closer, however, he noticed bruising around her neck, and realized that she wasn’t breathing. Recalling with horror that Seana was probably in the house as well, Jim rushed to her room and found the same gruesome scene: the nine-year-old had been strangled and tucked into her bed by an unknown killer. The child had also been savagely raped.
When police arrived, they were met with a disheartening lack of evidence. Though both Margaret and Seana had been strangled with a rope, the murder weapon was nowhere to be found. Further, there was no sign of forced entry, and few significant fingerprints obtained from the home. A few footprints from a brand of sneakers called Dunlop Volleys were recovered, but the shoes were a popular style, and were little help in narrowing down a suspect.
Investigators canvassed the neighborhood for more clues. One neighbor claimed they had heard a strange noise like a muffled scream at around eleven p.m. on August 7th, and further stated that their dog had started barking at around the same time. Other neighbors had witnessed a red utility vehicle, possibly a Ford, parked near the Tapp home that night, though this vehicle was never able to be traced.
Because Margaret was known to date many men, some of whom were married, there was no shortage of suspects, including current or former lovers, her ex-husband, the wives of her suitors, or even men she had rejected at some point in the past. A significant person of interest in this latter category was Margaret’s driving instructor, who according to witnesses was obsessed with Margaret but had his advances spurned. Notably, he told police that he had never been in the Tapp home, though his fingerprints were among those recovered from the scene.
Authorities also investigated a teenage neighbor who had done some yard work for Margaret Tapp, but had a reputation around town as a sexually aggressive troublemaker. They also looked into the possibility that the widow of the doctor who had purchased Margaret’s home may have perpetrated the crime, though the sexual assault of the nine-year-old Seana cast strong doubt upon this scenario.
DNA had been collected from Seana’s body at the time of the murders, and in 2008 it appeared that detectives had cracked the case: the profile seemed to match a Queensland man by the name of Russell John Gesah. But only two weeks after the announcement had been made, authorities were forced to walk back the accusation, as it came to light that the DNA from the case had been contaminated; a second test failed to corroborate the match. Gesah later sued, and Victoria police were obliged to review over six-thousand other cases in Victoria whose outcomes may have been compromised by similar errors. In 2009, another man named Farah Jama was freed after it was determined that the evidence in his rape trial had also been tainted.
The Tapp double murder was reopened in 2015, and two years later, a reward of one million Australian dollars was offered for any information leading to the conviction of the killer.
Crime Immemorial 