NSW: Police call on navy to help locate family of murder victim

AAP General News (Australia)
08-30-1999
NSW: Police call on navy to help locate family of murder victim

By John Kidman, Crime Reporter

SYDNEY, Aug 30 AAP - Sydney detectives have called on the Australian navy to help locate
the family of a homeless man found bashed to death while he slept in Sydney's Domain in June.

Former HMAS Melbourne shipman Keith Kettley, 59, was bludgeoned to death with a blunt
instrument - possibly an iron bar - as he slept in the City's parkland Domain on June 20.

The West Australian police is also being asked to help find his next of kin.

His death is being investigated along with a series of bashing murders of inner-Sydney
vagrants.

It follows those of Joanna Franklin, 30, and former art dealer David Murray, 59, last
November.

Since Mr Kettley's murder, a fourth victim, Reginald Mavin, 59, was found slumped across a
mattress in a park pavilion at Glebe last week.

It is now known Mr Kettley was among about 100 vagrants living in the Domain at the time of
his murder.

Detectives have been reluctant to link the killings but welfare agencies have voiced fears
a serial killer with a psychopathic hatred of the down and out may be responsible.

It is believed Mr Kettley spent four years in the Royal Australian Navy, much of it on
board the Melbourne.

But he left the service just months before the giant aircraft carrier collided with the
ill-fated HMAS Voyager at Jervis Bay in 1964.

Initial efforts to identify him were hampered by his use of two aliases, Kenneth Kerr and
Ronald Albert Cross, according to Sydney police sergeant Gary Phillips.

Early inquiries suggested he was born in Toowoomba to a Hilda Kettley in 1940 but may have
been raised in Brisbane by a woman named Elizabeth Groth who had since died, Sgt Phillips
said.

But investigators are now focusing on information he may have a son in Perth.

Five Kettley families had been identified in WA and each would have to be located and
interviewed with the help of local investigators, Sydney police said today.

An appeal to the dead man's former shipmates would also be published in Navy news
bulletins.

Meanwhile, a man named in court as a suspect in both the murders of Mr Murray and Mr
Kettley has so far managed to elude police.

"You have a hard enough time finding these types of witnesses even when they're willing to
talk to you," a police spokesman told AAP today.

"But when they don't want to be found, it makes the job about as difficult as it could be
but we believe he is still somewhere in Sydney."

AAP jk/sb/cfm

KEYWORD: HOMELESS (CARRIED EARLIER)

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