A confession is what's known as a 'walk-up start' to detectives.
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Crooks fessing up to a crime is helpful to police like Wangaratta's Peter McGuffie, but it doesn't close the case by any means.
"It's a good start to an investigation," he says. "But you still have to back up a confession with evidence."
A walk-up start is what Peter's great uncle Sydney Harold McGuffie had in 1942, investigating the brutal murders of three women in wartime Melbourne.
Syd, described by author Ian Shaw as a 'hard-bitten detective ... at the peak of his profession', had known two things from the moment Ivy McLeod's near-naked body was was found on May 3: that the murderer was a man, and he would strike again.
He was proven right only six days later when Pauline Thompson was strangled on the steps of her boarding house and her body 'carefully-arranged' in a similar, voyeuristic fashion.
By the third murder, of Gladys Hosking, rumours of an American soldier strangling women in the quiet of the light-restricted city were causing fear and division.
But the man dubbed the 'Brownout Strangler' - 24-year-old Private Eddie Leonski - had become reckless by that point.
The last murder was committed on the periphery of an American army camp in Royal Park, in a muddy trench that had been recently dug out for possible air strikes.
A drunk Leonski stumbled back to his tent and left clay everywhere.
Murder at Dusk details how the case unfolded from there, with Leonski being picked out from a line-up, and investigators receiving anecdotes of an alcoholic obsessed with his physical strength, who categorised women as either Madonnas like his dear mother, or whores.
He did not usually shake hands with people suspected of several murders, but he had wanted to be able to gauge the man's strength himself, Shaw wrote of Detective Sergeant McGuffie's first interview with the murderer.
He softened the atmosphere a bit as well, asking Leonski about his upbringing. Almost by stealth, McGuffie then proceeded to introduce the concept of murder.
Upon realising the weight of the case against him, Leonski confessed.
How Syd and his team brought justice to the American - punishment being death by hanging - is intriguing to his great nephew.
Peter read Murder at Dusk cover-to-cover after it was published last year.
"They had hardly any forensics - fingerprints were probably the best they had - and no CCTV, so they relied on a lot of witnesses," he says.
"Syd was a good talker and he interviewed Leonski for four days.
"Leonski had confessed to another soldier, but that soldier could have been lying - police still had to prove he did it."
The Brownout Strangler came during changes within Victoria Police - it was the first major case involving what was then unofficially known as the Homicide Squad.
A summary prepared for the squad's 60th anniversary explains the head of the Criminal Investigation Branch sent a report to the Chief Commissioner requesting more resourcing, leading to a meeting between the two men that is attributed to the squad's formation in 1943.
"From 1940, Syd was at number one division and was responsible for investigations into murders - he was the sole homicide investigator for the force," Peter says.
"After Leonski, the story goes Syd said to one of his bosses, 'I think we need a homicide squad'.
"He was in the media a lot.
"The website Trove has newspapers going back to the 1870s, and I typed Syd's name in and he came up about 600 times in articles, from when he went to Warrnambool as a constable to all the homicides he went to."
One of those stories is from the March 1, 1923 edition of The Argus, and reads; Public interest has been strongly maintained in the discovery, in sensational circumstances ... of the body of a young woman.
The report of a man throwing something into the Yarra River had come across Syd's desk and he decided to find out for himself what it was.
"They didn't have search and rescue back then, so he put some of the old diving gear on and went in," Peter says.
"He finds the stolen motorbike that was thrown off the bridge, and then finds the headless body of Bertha Coghlan, a missing persons case he was investigating."
There might be an element of luck to that particular breakthrough, but Syd also put in the hard yards.
"He did his own crime scenes and body recoveries; there's a story that he went down in a bosun's chair into a mine shaft," Peter says.
"It took three days to pump out 80 feet of water and dig all the mud out, and Syd found the torso of a man.
"In the 80s and 90s police used to dress up mannequins - he started that.
"He had quite a few run-ins with Squizzy Taylor, a famous gangster in the 20s and 30s who was Australia's Al Capone, and they had a punch-up one time."
Syd investigated hundreds of murders, but his celebrity-like reputation was also due to his character.
"He lived in Essendon and had a rose garden," Peter says.
"There's a newspaper piece that reads 'Sydney Harold McGuffie, who, the story goes, always plucked a red rose for his lapel before he investigated a murder, retired from the Victorian Police Force yesterday, after 37 years' service'."
This legendary detective who wore an immaculate suit and a bowler hat was known as 'Guff', a nickname his great nephew has also received.
But Peter never met his namesake; Syd died in 1964, five months before he was born.
"We didn't really talk much about him - I've learned a lot more in recent years," Peter says.
"Dad lived in Wangaratta, and Syd lived in Essendon, and I think just through family catch-ups Syd used to tell a few stories."
So was Sergeant McGuffie the reason Peter joined Victoria Police 32 years ago? Not exactly.
"I remember from about five years old onward, I wanted to join the police force - I had no other ambition to do anything else," he says.
"I used to watch Division Four and as a kid we all knew the local coppers.
"It was everything I expected - it was fun.
"When I joined up we only had one task: catch the crooks. And we used to do it really well.
"Now we are doing a lot of other things too."
One of the more interesting cases Peter was involved with happened while he was working at Moorabbin.
"We had a missing persons case come through from Clayton police, and I read it and went, 'This is not right'," he says.
"For most missing persons, it's either financial, domestic-related, suicide, or kids going missing who are back in 24 hours.
"But with this one, he worked full-time, didn't have any financial issues or mental illness, no children, no wife, and he just disappeared off the face of the earth."
Peter went to the man's Cheltenham flat and found reading glasses and cigarettes on the table, and no car.
There was also something surprising in his wardrobe - indicating a certain sexual preference - but nothing explaining his absence.
IN OTHER NEWS:
"We requested his phone records and we traced the last call to a prostitute in Ormond," Peter says.
At this stage, Peter and his team were still treating it as a missing person case, but went to the woman's address for a routine inquiry.
"She said she hadn't heard from him in a while, but we knew about the phone call," Peter says.
"We did a stand up with the media unit, and a couple days later we got the phone call that they had found his car, in Ormond.
"So we get a warrant, and there's a guy at the house, Peter Stein, who was a suspect for murder in the early 80s.
"We seized a number of items, but didn't arrest anybody at that stage.
"Four or five days later the body turns up in Gippsland, in the bush. It had been there for a couple weeks."
The courts found in 2007 that a bondage session between Stein, the prostitute who was his girlfriend, and the victim had turned deadly.
"They wanted to charge him with murder, but didn't have a cause of death - he was done for manslaughter," Peter says.
"And it turns out, the day we went around to the house, the body was in the garage.
"That was an interesting one.
"I came up to Wangaratta to kick back a bit, but I've learned more up here than I did in Melbourne."
Sergeant McGuffie has been part of missing persons, armed robbery, drug and other units in his time, all which didn't exist when the Sergeant McGuffie born in 1891 was the officer in charge of the Homicide Squad.
Aside from Ian Shaw's book and Peter's collection of articles, there isn't much written history about Syd.
But as the detective who allowed the Brownout Strangler to take him by the throat and demonstrate 'exactly how he killed those three women', Syd deserves the recognition.
"I've been in the force 33 years, and Syd did 37 years, so I'll probably retire around the same time and I think I might write a book about him them," Peter says.
"It's got to be in your genes, I reckon.
"You can train someone to be a detective, but you either have got it in you, or you haven't."