It's the 13th of January, 1977, in the inner Melbourne suburb of Collingwood. A neighbour steps through an open back gate at 147 Easey Street, drawn by three days of silence, uncollected mail and the persistent, muffled cries of a baby. The back door is ajar, just as it had been for days. Inside, the smell hits first. Then, in the front bedroom, a horrifying scene: a young woman lying on the floor, her body marked by dozens of stab wounds. Near the front door, a second woman lies face down, in a position that suggests she'd tried desperately to fight, or flee. In a back room, in his cot, a sixteen-month-old boy is found alive. Dehydrated, distressed, but alive. He had been alone with his mother's body for three days.

The two women were Suzanne Armstrong, 28, and Susan Bartlett, 27. Childhood friends from country Victoria, sharing a rented terrace house in a suburb that, in 1977, was still rough around the edges. Whoever came through that house that night left behind a horror so severe that police would call it, then and for decades after, Victoria's most brutal crime. This is the story of the Easey Street murders, and the man now facing trial for it, nearly fifty years on.
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Collingwood, in the mid-1970s, was not the trendy, cafe-lined suburb it is today. It was a working-class pocket of inner Melbourne, full of narrow laneways, tightly packed Victorian terrace houses and factories. Rent was cheap, which meant it attracted students, young workers and share-housers, the kind of tenants happy to leave a front door unlocked and blinds open on a warm summer night, because that was simply how people lived. Neighbours knew each other. Doors were rarely bolted. It was, as one retired detective on the case later put it, a more trusting time, when this kind of crime rarely touched an ordinary street.

Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett had grown up together in Benalla, a country town in Victoria's north-east. They were old high school friends, close enough that when Suzanne returned to Australia after spending time on the Greek island of Naxos, where she'd had a son, Gregory, with a local man, it was Susan she turned to. The two women decided to share a home in Melbourne, and in October 1976, ten weeks before the murders, they signed a lease on the narrow terrace at 147 Easey Street. Susan worked as an arts and crafts teacher at the Collingwood Education Centre, where she was remembered fondly by students, including several from Melbourne's Greek community, one of whom later recalled her sewing traditional costumes by hand for a school dance troupe in her own spare time. Suzanne was raising her son as a single mother, adjusting to life back in Australia after several years abroad. Their home had a long central corridor connecting three bedrooms to a kitchen and bathroom at the rear, opening onto a small yard and a laneway, a floorplan typical of the workers' cottages built throughout Collingwood in the previous century, and one that would later prove significant, since it gave a killer a quiet, unlit path in from the back lane and out again, without needing to pass a busy street.

On the night of the 10th of January 1977, the two friends had a quiet evening at home. Susan's brother visited for dinner with his girlfriend, and the two couples watched television together before the guests left, around 9 pm. It's believed Suzanne and Susan were killed later that same night. No one heard anything unusual, or if they did, no one thought much of it, not at first.

The days that followed painted a slow, chilling picture, pieced together only in hindsight. Neighbours noticed the women's puppy wandering loose in the street. They noticed the back door standing open, and, most disturbing of all, the sound of a baby crying from inside a house that had gone eerily quiet. It took three full days, until the 13th of January, for anyone to act on that unease and step inside.

When homicide detectives arrived, they documented a crime of appalling violence. Suzanne Armstrong had been stabbed twenty-seven times as she lay in the front bedroom, and had been sexually assaulted after her death. Susan Bartlett, found near the front door, had been stabbed fifty-five times, and the wounds on her body suggested she had tried to fight off her attacker, or to escape. There was no sign of forced entry, though a footprint on a front windowsill hinted at how the killer might have gotten in. Whoever committed the murders had used the bathroom afterwards, apparently to clean up, leaving the bathtub and towels stained, before slipping out through the back door and into the laneway beyond. The kitchen light had been left burning. No weapon was ever recovered. Detectives also found two notes inside the house: one from Suzanne's boyfriend, who had visited with his brother after the killings and let himself in without realising what had happened; another pinned to the front door, about the missing puppy. It was a house frozen mid-routine, its ordinary domestic clutter sitting alongside a scene of horror.

Word of the murders spread through Melbourne fast, and with it, fear. Sixteen detectives were assigned to the case. Investigators built a list that would eventually run to around two hundred and seventy-four persons of interest, later narrowed to roughly 130 possible suspects, including a group of construction workers who'd been building a property directly behind the Easey Street house at the time. Detectives also explored a possible link to another unsolved Melbourne case: the 1975 disappearance of Julie Garciacelay, an American librarian who vanished from her North Melbourne flat. One suspect in that earlier case, a crime reporter who had known Garciacelay through work, had, by coincidence, been staying in the house next door to 147 Easey Street on the very night Suzanne and Susan were killed. It was an eerie thread that investigators could never quite tie into a conviction.

Despite the human resources thrown at it, and despite a $50,000 reward offered within the year, the case went cold. Melbourne moved on, as cities do, but the Armstrong and Bartlett families never did. For decades, the file sat largely dormant, revisited periodically as forensic science advanced, but never cracked. In 1999, detectives DNA-tested eight of the case's prime suspects. None matched. One had already returned to the United Kingdom. The trail seemed to run cold again.

Every so often, a piece of unrelated news would drag Easey Street back into the headlines. The house itself changed hands in 1983, after sitting empty for six years, its grim history apparently no deterrent to buyers looking for cheap inner-city real estate. Journalists periodically revisited the case for anniversary pieces, and true crime writers picked over the same worn details: the open back door, the missing puppy, the baby found alive. But without new evidence, there was little for police to add. What kept the case from disappearing entirely wasn't a breakthrough. It was the quiet, dogged refusal of a handful of detectives, and of Suzanne's own family, to let it be forgotten.

It wasn't until 2011 that the case was quietly reopened, this time under veteran homicide detective Ron Iddles, a name well known in Victorian policing for his tenacity on cold cases. Then, in January 2017, forty years to the month since the murders, Victoria Police made a dramatic move: a reward of up to $1 million for information leading to a conviction, one of the largest such rewards ever offered in the state. It was a signal that police had not given up, even if the public largely had. Suzanne's son, Gregory, who had been adopted and raised in Queensland by his mother's younger sister, became an unlikely but persistent voice in keeping the case alive in the media, advocating for the answers that had eluded his family for his entire life.

Behind the scenes, though, forensic science was quietly closing the gap that time had opened. Advances in DNA profiling meant that evidence collected from the crime scene in 1977, including samples later linked to the sexual assault on Suzanne Armstrong, could be re-examined with technology that didn't exist when the case began. Investigators kept building and refining their list of suspects, testing profiles against the small pool of men who had never been fully eliminated.

By 2017, one name kept resurfacing on that list: a Collingwood local named Perry Kouroumblis. Detectives asked him to submit a DNA sample, a routine but pointed request they had by then made of dozens of men connected to the case in one way or another. Instead, Kouroumblis left the country, moving to Greece, where he held dual citizenship, saying at the time that he needed to care for an ailing parent. Whatever his reasons, the move placed him beyond the immediate reach of Victorian police. Under Greek law, authorities could not pursue an arrest warrant for murder while he remained a resident there, due to statute of limitations protections on initiating such proceedings locally. For years, Kouroumblis lived in Greece, seemingly out of reach, while back in Melbourne, his name sat quietly near the top of an ever-shrinking list, waiting for either a legal opening or a mistake.

Then, in September 2024, everything changed. Kouroumblis, now 65, travelled to Rome. The moment he set foot in Italy, outside Greek jurisdiction, an Interpol Red Notice was triggered, and on the 19th of September 2024, he was arrested at Leonardo da Vinci-Fiumicino Airport. It had taken almost forty-eight years, but a man police believed responsible for one of Victoria's most infamous unsolved crimes was finally in custody.

The arrest stunned Melbourne. For the Armstrong and Bartlett families, it was a moment they had waited an entire lifetime for. In a statement released through police, the families thanked investigators for their persistence, describing decades of grief that had "changed many lives irrevocably." Days after his arrest, Kouroumblis appeared before a court in Rome, where he indicated he would not fight extradition, telling the court he intended to clear his name. He was formally extradited and arrived back in Melbourne on the 3rd of December 2024, nearly forty-eight years after the murders he was accused of committing.

So who was the man behind the decades-long mystery? Perikilis "Perry" Kouroumblis grew up in and around Collingwood, in the same tight, working-class community where Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett had made their home. In a detail that struck many as deeply unsettling once it became public, Kouroumblis had, as a teenager, attended Collingwood High School, now known as Collingwood College, the very school where Susan Bartlett worked as an arts and crafts teacher. At the time of the killings, he was just seventeen years old, a local teenager living in the same small radius as the two women he's accused of murdering.

Beyond that, comparatively little about his early life has been made public. He went on to live an unremarkable adult life in Melbourne for decades, largely out of the public eye, before relocating to Greece in 2017, at the exact moment detectives came knocking with a DNA request. That timing, more than anything, is what kept his name near the top of the suspect list in the years that followed. Retired homicide detective Peter Hiscock, who worked the case in its early years, later reflected on how different the world was in 1977, a time when people simply didn't lock their doors or think twice about who might walk in off the street. It was that trust, misplaced or not, that may have cost Suzanne and Susan their lives.

For the men who investigated the case across four decades, many of them now retired and elderly themselves, Kouroumblis's arrest in Rome brought a strange kind of vindication. Several had spent entire careers convinced the killer was hiding in plain sight, a local face rather than a stranger passing through. His decision to leave for Greece just as police tightened their net only reinforced what many of them had long suspected.

When Kouroumblis finally returned to Melbourne in December 2024, police charged him with two counts of murder and one count of rape, the historical term for the offence at the time being "carnal knowledge without consent." He was represented by prominent criminal defence lawyer Bill Doogue, who would later step aside in favour of barristers Dermot Dann KC and Daniel Sala as the case progressed. Kouroumblis pleaded not guilty to all charges and has consistently maintained his innocence.

His committal hearing began on the 29th of October 2025 at the Melbourne Magistrates' Court, running across roughly six days spread over two months and involving nineteen witnesses, among them retired detectives, former neighbours and one-time persons of interest in the case. The court heard how police had, over the decades, whittled their list from 274 persons of interest down to 130 possible suspects, and eventually to seven men considered strong, significant suspects, a list that reportedly included a journalist who had been staying next door on the night of the murders, and two brothers who had visited the house the day before the bodies were found.

The forensic evidence at the heart of the prosecution's case centred on DNA recovered decades after the crime. A forensic scientist told the court she had tested bedsheets, carpet fibres, fingernail scrapings and a nightdress recovered from the scene, comparing them against a range of DNA profiles, including one linked to Kouroumblis. Crucially, prosecutors alleged that DNA material, described in court as "tissue," was recovered from a vehicle once owned by Kouroumblis in 2018, and matched against sperm and blood samples found at Easey Street in 1977. Retired homicide squad detective Adrian Donehue, one of the first officers on the scene in 1977, gave evidence describing how Suzanne Armstrong's body had been positioned in what he called a classic pose you would expect to see for post-mortem rape.

The sexual assault charge itself became a genuine point of legal contention. Because interfering with a corpse was not a recognised offence under Victorian law in 1977, prosecutors were forced to pursue the historical rape charge instead, arguing Armstrong had been assaulted while still alive, or in the earliest moments after death. The magistrate overseeing the committal, Brett Sonnet, ultimately found there was insufficient weight of evidence to support a jury conviction on that charge and discharged it in November 2025, while finding there was enough evidence for Kouroumblis to be committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court on the two murder charges. Kouroumblis pleaded not guilty to both counts of murder as the committal concluded.

The story did not end there. In early 2026, at a preliminary hearing in the Supreme Court, prosecutor Patrick Bourke SC informed the court that a fresh indictment had been filed, restoring the rape charge alongside the two murder counts. Kouroumblis has pleaded not guilty and denies all of the offences against him. He remains in custody as the case moves toward a full Supreme Court trial, with directions hearings continuing to map out how nearly fifty-year-old forensic and witness evidence will be tested before a jury.

For now, the Easey Street case sits in an unusual limbo: no longer a cold case, but not yet resolved by verdict either. It stands as one of the longest-running unsolved matters in Victorian criminal history to reach an active prosecution, a rare instance where patient, decades-long re-testing of preserved evidence has outlasted both the passage of time and, allegedly, a suspect's attempt to place himself beyond reach.

The house at 147 Easey Street still stands today, sold and resold over the decades: first in 1983 after sitting vacant for six years, then again in 2011, and once more in 2017, each sale reigniting public fascination with the case. Its notoriety has outgrown the street itself, spawning books, including Tom Prior's 1996 account and Helen Thomas's 2019 work "Murder on Easey Street," along with multiple podcast investigations, including a 2018 series by journalist Andrew Rule and a dedicated six-part Casefile Presents production in 2024. Artist Steve Cox, who lived diagonally opposite the murder house in the years immediately following the killings, went on to create a number of artworks inspired by the case, a reminder of just how deeply this single, brutal night embedded itself into Melbourne's cultural memory.

What continues to resonate most, though, isn't the mystery, or even the eventual arrest, but the sheer ordinariness of the setting in which it happened. Two young women, recently arrived in the city, sharing a rented terrace house with an open back door and unlocked windows, in a suburb where neighbours still looked out for each other. It was, by every account, an unremarkable house on an unremarkable street, until one January night in 1977 made it infamous. Suzanne Armstrong's son, Gregory, grew up without his mother, raised by an aunt in Queensland, carrying a loss he was too young to remember but that shaped the whole of his life. For close to fifty years, the Armstrong and Bartlett families lived with unanswered questions. Whatever the Supreme Court ultimately decides, their long wait for a trial, at least, is finally over.

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