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interest—a term that does not mean ‘suspect’ but does mean someone who cannot be ruled out as a possible perpetrator. In the end they focused a lot on the family, because many murders are committed by family members, and in this case there seemed no conceivable reason why a stranger would kill two old people and place them in their beds.
    The problem was the detectives could find no reason any member of the family would have wanted to kill them. As a subsequent coronial inquest was told, much thought went into Albert and the hypothesis that he had killed his parents in anger because they would no longer help him financially, or for some sort of financial benefit, although it was never clear what this might be. Under his parents’ 1990 wills, Albert received the family company, which was heavily in debt, while his two sisters received their other assets, which comprised the Byron Road house, the seven acres it stood on, and $68,000 in the bank. To add to the confusion, there was some question as to whether Albert had known the terms of the will, and there was also the possibility there had been a later will that had been destroyed in a fire at a solicitor’s office.
    The extended Perish family was quickly riven by suspicion, and at first most immediate family members refused to talk to police, which was odd. But over the next year some information came in. One member of the family told detectives that Albert, referring to his father, had once said, ‘That bastard has been holding me back for years stopping me from doing what I want to do . . . If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t be in this mess.’ Another family member explained how badly Albert was in debt, and how he had been trying to set up a sawmill at Coolongolook, and had asked for a large loan. In fact Albert and the egg business were pretty well bankrupt, with debts of some $750,000. Albert was behind on the interest repayments on the mortgages he’d taken out on the land he owned, on which he was paying 18.5 per cent interest. He had sold seven acres of the Leppington farm a few years earlier, and had been trying to sell another seven, without success.
    An alternative theory about the deaths of Anthony and Frances—promoted by Albert for a while—was that they had been killed by another member of the family in order to stop them giving Albert any more money and thereby whittling away their own inheritance. In July 1993 police placed listening devices in Albert’s house, but all they got was him talking about wild theories such as that one of his sisters had hired a hitman with the assistance of her solicitor. Then and in the coming years, he would flood the police with a variety of unhelpful notions about the deaths, one involving a Bermuda-registered company linked to organised crime. All these theories he set out at length on paper. He was obviously and irritatingly eccentric, but at the end of the day there was no evidence he was a killer.
    The following year, Albert was evicted from his property in Heath Road when the mortgage was foreclosed and the place was put up for sale. He was allowed back in to collect his equipment, and was seen there the evening before the auction. At 4.30 am the next day, two buildings on the property were set alight by an unknown person.
    The murder investigation dragged on for years, and police found nothing to enable them to identify the killer or killers. In 1995 a reward of $100,000 was offered for information, but to no effect. For those left behind, life went on. Justin Birk Hill’s girlfriend’s place was raided by police, who found lots of false identity papers and an encryptor used to scramble mobile phone calls. Birk Hill abandoned his legal practice and moved to South Australia, where he became national president of the Gypsy Jokers outlaw motorcycle gang. Anthony Perish joined him in Adelaide for a while. In June 1996 Birk Hillwas convicted of conspiring to