THE LESBIAN VAMPIRE KILLER

She was 23, black hair cropped to the scalp. Nearly six feet tall, she weighed in at 270 pounds. Dressed in black leather, she slept by day and played by night stomping her big boots through the rough taverns of Brisbane Australia. Nobody, but nobody tangled with ‘Ace’. One of the guys tried it- once.
Ace had just left the Gilded Lily, a club on Brisbane’s notorious West Side. She stood for a moment in the club’s parking lot sniffing the air of a sweet, tropical night, then strolled down to where she had parked her all black Yamaha, she called the Midnight Special.
There was a young guy sitting astride it making vroom vroom noises and laughing to his mates. Without a word of warning, Ace hauled him off, battered him over the head with her crash helmet. As he lay on the ground, she thudded those big boots of hers into his ribs. When she had finished, Ace raised her pinkie and beckoned with it to the guy’s open-mouthed mates. There were no takers: and to the guys’ disgust, she licked her helmet clean of blood before gunning her Midnight Special into the darkness.
As the night wind needled her cheeks, Ace remembered other nights on a high mountain peak where she had drunk the blood of slaughtered goats and chickens before falling into a hip grinding frenzy of sexual abandonment. She licked her lips, tasted again the forbidden taste of human blood, liked it and wanted more.
6.a.m.Saturday October 21 1989.Two pupils from the prestigious Brisbane Grammar school rowing on Brisbane River saw the man lying beside the ramp of a boat shed. Something in the way the man was lying told them he wasn’t sleeping. As they moored their skiff alongside the ramp, they heard the thud of feet on the towpath and called out to a jogger panting towards them. The jogger, oblivious to everything but his Walkman, couldn’t hear but he did see them wave and came over to where they pointed. When he saw what they were pointing at, he vomited over his running shoes.
Senior Detective Sergeant Pat Coogan grumbled as he strode towards the boat shed. If the call had come in an hour later his shift would have been finished and he would now be sitting in the Jolly Swagman with a beer and the racing guide before him.
Forensics were already at the murder site, poking and prodding around the blood saturated grass. Coogan nodded to them and glanced over at some spectators grouped near the shed. Standing apart from them was a gaggle of young girls. One in particular came to his attention. She stood head and shoulders above the rest and seemed agitated.
"Get those civilians outa here," Coogan growled at a young constable, before joining forensics.
Flies can smell blood from a long way away. Once one has smelled it, and come to investigate, by some form of fly telepathy they tell others.
Maybe they communicate by humming, Coogan thought as he brushed away the black cone buzzing above the corpse.
The civilians, banished across the street, couldn’t see much from where they now stood. Coogan watched as the tall girl he had noticed on arriving climbed into a green car with her companions. She was most striking.
The detective wandered around felt the feel of the place. The boat shed had aluminium doors: still wet blood smeared its corrugations. There was a space where the door didn’t quite meet with the cement. He slid his fingers into the space and withdrew a cheap plastic wallet. He opened the wallet. Inside was a bankcard, a Union card and other things advising that the owner of the wallet was a 47- year old Clyde Edward Baldock. There was also currency notes amounting to $35.
Why the bloody Hell, Coogan thought, would anyone drop their drawers and shove their wallet under a boat-shed door?
For the body was naked except for its socks. A chequered flannel shirt lay under its arm, a pair of underpants beneath its foot. Nearby, neatly arranged on the grass, a cardigan, shoes and slacks. Obviously there had been no struggle, for the grass around the body, although blood soaked, was untrampled.
Coogan bent down, picked up a half smoked cigarette butt and had a momentary vision of a naked man lying on the grass smoking, waiting: but waiting for what-who?
Olive Chang of Forensics drew his attention to the area around the body’s neck. Coogan looked and could see gristle and things poking from the space where Clyde’s head met his neck.
"Knife wounds," Chang said. "Obviously from a broad bladed weapon."
"And what about these?" Coogan pointed to a series of puncture marks around the back and shoulder area.
"Overkill," Chang said. "He was dead before they were made."
"Looks like whoever did it used two weapons," Coogan said.
Chang agreed. "Yes, a big knife and perhaps a stiletto."
Coogan pointed to other marks on the neck. "What caused these?"
"Fingers," Chang said.
"Fingers?"
Chang looked at the marks through a huge magnifying glass. "Definitely fingers. See the whorls?"
Coogan took the glass from her. "Them’s not whorls," he said. "Them’s cracks."
Chang grabbed the glass back. There were cracks superimposed over the prints.
"What makes cracks?’ Coogan asked.
"Lips?
"Lips," Coogan said. "I think someone pressed their fingers on Mr Baldock’s neck, pumped up whatever blood they could get, put their lips to the wound and sucked it from him."
He turned to where the young constable who had moved the spectators was gagging. "Keep it down, kid," he said. "Keep it down. You’ll see worse than this." And remembered the bloated floaters dragged from the same Brisbane river, mangled jumpers shovelled out from beneath trains, charred lumps of flesh with arms upraised like boxers found in still smouldering ruins.
"Turn it over," he said. "Lets have a look at the face."
And when they turned the body over, the head didn’t turn with it. For whoever had killed Clyde Baldock had almost severed the head from the body.

Coogan smeared Vick’s vapour rub under his nose before entering the morgue. It helped, but not much, to mask the acridity of formaldehyde and the sweet smell of death. He strode past the bodies of a drug courier whose condoms filled with Heroin had burst within him. The church elder, liver swollen with cirrhosis, whose car had tangled with a truck wrong way on a roundabout. The prominent politician, lungs blackened with smoke and the research assistant who had been found with him after the fire in their motel room.
Eugene Lovecroft, pathologist on duty that day, looked up from Edward Clyde Baldock and raised his eye shield.
"Yours?"
"Mine," Coogan said. He looked at his watch. The first race was long over.
"Someone gave him more than the time of day. He’s completely ensanguined."
"Yeah," Coogan said. "The ground was saturated and it looked as if it had been painted on the boat shed door."
"Figures," Lovecroft said. "The first blow to the neck severed the two main arteries and just about severed the jugular." He pointed with his probe at the wounds. The blood had been washed from the body since Coogan had last seen it. The skin was beginning to turn slightly grey. The wounds stood out against it.
"He, she or it, then pulled the head back." Lovecroft pointed to a tuft of hair sticking up from the scalp. Whoever had washed the body hadn’t washed the tuft for Coogan could see clots of dried blood there. "And slashed the knife from right to left-obviously left handed-across the throat."
He pointed to three wounds in the chest. "After slashing the throat, the attacker then turned him over. The big knife was used again, driven up to the hilt-here, here and here."
Coogan could see the distinct bruise marks around the wounds.
"But the first wounds to the neck were what killed him."
"What about the finger marks on the neck?" Coogan asked. "And I thought I saw lip marks too."
Lovecraft smiled. "As if someone had drunk his blood? Olive told me of your theory."
"Well?"
Lovecraft looked down at the gaping curve across the throat showing clearly the severed trachea, muscles and arteries."I wouldn’t put anything past whoever did this," he said.
Coogan turned to where Clyde Edward Baldock’s belongings lay neatly folded on a trolley. He went through the pants pockets- empty, shirt pockets-nothing. The wallet-he’d checked that on site. He picked up a shoe. Well worn, its high polish showed the contours of the thirty odd bones in a human foot. He put it down, picked up the other one, turned it over and as he did something fell from it.
"What’ve you found?"
Coogan looked at the blood-smeared bankcard and the name, Tracy Avril Wigginton. "A calling card," he said.
Detectives Mike Austin and Jim Samios parked their unmarked police car in the loading zone before a row of shops in the inner Brisbane suburb of Enoggerra. No 17 was the entrance to the apartments above and Samios pressed the button under the names of Graves Waugh, and Wigginton three times before the intercom was answered.
The detective introduced himself, explained he was making inquiries into an incident in Orleigh Park and would like to speak to a Tracy Wigginton regarding it.
The young woman who opened the door of Flat 2 was tall enough to look the detectives in the eye as she asked to see their warrant cards. Dressed in a long, white dress she seemed to glide as she led the officers down the hall. "Would you like a cup of tea, guys? I’ve just made it."
She sat them down, laid the tea on a tombstone sitting on breezeblocks.
"Unusual table," Austen said.
"I like unusual things," Ace smiled at him with her huge, dark, almost black eyes. "Now what’s all this about?"
"Austen clicked his pen, opened his nootbook, began the interview.
"Of course I have a Bankcard." Ace pulled open a drawer on a side table, took out a wallet and leafed through the card holder."That’s funny."
"No bankcard?" Samios said.
"Well I had it here. Its always here."
As she fumbled through the wallet again, Samios noticed the tattoos on the backs of her hands. One was an open eye, the other a lion, rampant "We found a bankcard with your name on it in Orleigh Park this morning," he said.
Ace flashed her pool dark eyes."I was in Orleigh last night," she said. "With my friends, Kim and Waugh." She hovered the teapot over the officer’s mugs. They were still full.
"Kim was having some relationship problems…so was I …we went for a walk and Kim started fooling’ around. Y’know? That’s when I must have lost it."
"The bankcard."
Ace lay back on the couch, sipped from her mug, didn’t answer.
"How did you get to the park?"
"In my car," she gestured to the street. "The green Holden, parked outside."
"Mind if I have a look?"
Ace sat up, smoothed down her dress. "At what?" she said.
"The car," Simios said.
Ace threw him the keys. "Help yourself."
Simios found a beach bag in the boot. There was a towel in the bag. There were rust red marks all over the towel. He bagged it, tagged it, marked it and took it back upstairs with him. "The thing is, Tracy," he said. "We found your bankcard in proximity to a serious matter we’re investigating."
Ace swirled the dregs around her cup, examined the leaf pattern.
"A man was murdered in Orleigh last night, "Simios said. "We would like you to show us where you lost the bankcard. Then I would like you to come to the station with us and make a statement."
There was no fuss. Ace, still dressed in her flowing whites, showed them the small playground where, "Kim and I sort of wrestled around on the grass."
"And this is where you think you must have lost your bankcard?"
"Yeah."
The detectives read the scenario of a bankcard falling from a wallet,tumbling down a hill and landing in the shoe of a naked man sitting smoking far below. "I think we should go to the station now," Austen said.
It was nearly 2.p.m when they finished the videotaped interview. After the taping, they sat down to a leisurely lunch-deliberately leisurely- for Coogan had sent another team to interview Ace’s flatmates, Waugh and Graves.
Apparently Ace had been out all night, returning to the flat at 7.30.a.m.
"She was excited," Graves said. "Spoke about seeing a body in the park."
"She told me the same thing," Waugh butted in. " I thought it was another of her stories- she was always telling stories. Anyway she kept asking me to drive to the park for a look."
"And…"
"The place was crawling with cops and we did see a body."
"The head was all covered in blood," Graves said.
"Tell them about the knife," Waugh said.
"I didn’t see no knife."
"Yes, you did. You saw her as well as I did. Sharpening that big knife of hers."
"What, big knife?" Someone asked.
Waugh’s eyes swivelled to where a Montana hunter hung from its thong.
*
Back at the station, lunch over, Ace was gathering her things together. She had made her statement. It was plausible, convincing. "Can I go now?" She said.
The phone rang.
"Yes." Simios listened to what the team back at Enoggerra had to say. And as Ace turned to go he stopped her with, "But there’s just one more thing."
*
During her next interview, Ace spoke about the knife. It was a kitchen knife…always kept sharp…had no recollection of sharpening it that week, despite what her flatmates had allegedly said. Yes, she had gone down to the park that morning with Graves and Waugh. They had seen the body and it had been a horrible sight. Composed until now, Ace broke down. "Terrible what happened to that poor man. But I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know him. Where’s the motive?"
Simios had to agree. Despite what the flatmates had said about the knife, it was all conjecture. The bankcard could have blown down the hill. It could have been picked up by the victim, who could have put it in his shoe. Robbery could be ruled out. Coogan had found the wallet-money, bankcards intact. He turned at a knock on the interview room door, took the printout a constable handed him, read it and passed it over to Austen.
"Do you know a Linda Pachinski? Austen said.
"I’ve heard of her," Ace said.
"She’s just phoned in, confessing to being accomplice to a murder she says you committed."
Ace looked over at Samios. "Is this true?"
Samios nodded.
"OK," Ace said. "Switch the video back on. I’ll tell you what really happened."
Listening, watching everything on a monitor nearby, Coogan looked at his watch. The last race was just being run and it was barely 10 hours since he had first viewed Mr Baldock’s body.
*
Flamboyance was the norm at the Gilded Lily. To get the attention of the clientele, your entrance would have to be dramatic.
Heads turned from the bar as the front door was kicked open. Ace, dressed in black leather, hair buzz cut, stomped in on her big boots. Her three companions, Waugh, Kim and Patchinski, similarly dressed, fanned in behind her like gunfighters looking for trouble.
The duty manager, Stella Cooper, knew the trio well and took their order.
"What’re you celebrating, guys?" she asked as she brought the Champagne to their table.
"Halloween," Ace said and the table broke up.
"Halloween’s ten days away," Stella said. "October 31st. You’re early."
"Depends whose calendar you follow," Ace said and the table broke up again.
"But she didn’t even smile. And with that knife of hers, she called big Ace, stuffed down her boot, looked mean and fit enough to tangle with anything that came her way." And Stella was pleased when the girls scraped their chairs away and left around eleven.
The clientele were pleased too. It was as if a black cloud had lifted. Someone coined the juke. It was a golden oldie- Sinatra-Witchcraft.
The four of them climbed into Ace’s car and prowled Fortitude Valley as far as Chinatown. There were too many people, so they drove to Storey Bridge. Ace cut the engine on Kangaroo cliff and let the car cruise down River Terrace. Without her even toeing the brake, it stopped outside the Caledonian club as a man came out and waved for a taxi.
Clyde Edward Baldock couldn’t believe his luck when the car drew up beside him and the big breasted woman behind the wheel asked him if he wanted a lift home, or whatever.
Baldock chose the whatever. Those in the back of the car moved into the front, while Ace climbed in back with him. And whispered in his ear how she would give the father of four, grandfather of two, a time he would remember until they day he died, as the car turned into Vulture street and headed for Orleigh Park.
Ace took him by the hand down to the South Brisbane Sailing Club shed. There, she helped him undress while he partially undressed her: fingers fumbling on the belts and buckles of her outfit until those magnificent breasts were exposed.
Ace jumped away. "I gotta go to the toilet," she said. And left him throbbing in anticipation while she ran back to the car where the other three were sitting.
"He’s too strong," she said to Kim. "I need some help."
After all the plans made for this dark night, the resolve when faced with reality faded like mushrooms at dawn. "I can’t," Kim said.
Ace turned those eyes of hers to Lisa Patchinski.Lisa fell into the black pit of them and as usual obeyed. "I’ll do it," she said and held out her hand for the knife.
Baldock was where Ace had left him. Naked except for his socks, he stubbed out his cigarette and turned to greet her. And while he tried to couple with Ace, Lisa crept from behind the boathouse, raised a butterfly knife above them. Over the man’s shoulder she could see Ace’s eyes bore into hers, felt herself raise the blade higher and higher and was about to plunge it in his neck when the man turned, looked at her. When he looked at her she couldn’t do it and dropped her knife. But she watched as Ace pulled that big Montana hunter from her boot. And heard the crunch of metal on bone as Ace did it for her. And watched as Ace picked up her fallen knife and plunge it repeatedly into the man’s back put her lips to the wounds and drink the spurting blood.
When it was all over, Ace took a towel from the boot, went down to the river and washed herself and the knives clean.
*
It all came out at the trial. The significance of the remark Ace had made to the duty manager of the Gilded Lily just before midnight on October 20th, ‘It all depends on which calendar you go by.’
When the Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian in 1582, Halloween, a festival celebrated from druidic times, was progressed by 10 days. Some esoteric groups still use the old calendar when programming magic rituals, some of which are dated by the phases of the moon. Some regard the cusp of midnight October 20th an auspicious time to make sacrifice. Some, whose inclination is towards the primitif side of magic, make sacrifice of animal blood. Others, those on the dark side, human blood.
It was suggested that the victim was a blood offering. The knives used to slay him, sacrificial. Much was made of Ace’s tattoos, the goat’s head pendant and ‘death rings’ she wore on every finger. ‘Signs and symbols of a cult where sacrifices were made and blood drunk.’
"I may be a lesbian," Ace said. "But I’m no vampire."
Testimony was given that Ace was suffering a personality disorder where she was controlled by four different entities-maybe more. And it took more than a year for her case to plough through the judicial ritual of a medical tribunal into her fitness to stand trial and the committal proceedings. In an attempt to prove Ace unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity, her counsel told of her involvement in ‘satanic cults’ since early childhood. However, she was declared sane and a date was set for her trial.
Ace was horrified. If the trial went ahead, all those things she had told the psychiatrists about satanic cults, blood and human sacrifices made at midnight would be dragged out into the glaring light of day. Ace, who shunned the sun and mirrors, prowled the streets at night dressed in black, those hypnotic eyes of hers hidden behind dark glasses, couldn’t take this.
She sacked her legal team, hired another and instructed them that she would be pleading guilty.
Her trial was held at Brisbane Magistrate’s Court on Monday January 21 1991. At 10 a.m. Chief Magistrate Deer after hearing the preliminary submissions accepted Ace’s plea of guilty to murder in the 1st degree and sentenced her to life imprisonment-in reality 14 years. Her trial took exactly nine minutes. Coogan’s investigation, from when he first saw the body until he charged her with murder, took just over 13 hours.
On February 21 1991 the trial of her three companions opened in Brisbane’s Supreme Court before Justice Mackenzie and all the perversions and obscenities Ace had tried to suppress by pleading guilty came out.
Lisa Patchinski said in her defence that she was helpless before Ace’s power. They had met a week before murder-the night of a full moon. "No one had ever dominated me like that before in my life," she said. "She had the power of telepathy and could make people disappear."
Patchinski, who, according to medical testimony, had difficulty holding on to reality, had become emotionally and later sexually involved. An involvement which only ended when she realised that what she had participated in that night was not a dream, but an act of premeditated murder. "I couldn’t stop her," she said. "She was like a shark in a feeding frenzy."
"I tried to," Kim Jervis said. "But she said she would rip my arms off if she was disturbed."
Afterwards," said the other co-accused, Tracey Waugh, "she looked as if she had enjoyed a 3 course meal."
Dr Peter Mullholland, consultant psychiatrist at Royal Brisbane hospital, testified Patchinski had told him Ace didn’t eat solid food: subsisting instead on animal blood purchased from a slaughterhouse.
When all the evidence had been heard, the jury retired at 4:45 p.m. on Wednesday, February 13,1991. They remained out until the morning of the 15th.
The verdict wiped Operation Desert Storm from the Courier Mail’s front page. Tracey Waugh was acquitted. Kim Jervis, found guilty of manslaughter, was sentenced to 18 years. Lisa Patchinski, who couldn’t bring herself to plunge the knife into Clyde Baldock’s neck, but stood by while her demon lover did, was sentenced, like Ace, to life.