Just before midnight on the 6th of December 1994, Elisabeth Membrey arrived home from her shift at the Manhattan Hotel in Melbourne.
Police estimated that by 3:00 in the morning she was dead and concluded she was murdered in her hallway.
After 16 years and a tireless investigation, former detective Tim Peck was able to finally make an arrest.
Former detective Tim Peck unpacks his investigation of the Elisabeth Membrey case on the Crime Insiders podcast:
As the case went to court, it soon turned from a successful investigation to Tim spiralling into a dark and near-fatal place.
“The only success I was driven by was that success at court,” Peck said.
Recently Peck came across a picture of himself and Membrey’s parents standing out the front of the Melbourne Magistrates Courts.
“As I looked at the photo more deeply, even by 2011, I was struggling with alcohol significantly. My life wasn’t what I wanted it to be. The mask was fully on,” he said.
“We lost the trial and the suspect was found not guilty. So there weren’t any real winners out of that. Joy and Roger certainly didn’t get to find the location of their missing daughter.”
Peck said he began to reflect on how detectives measure their success. He said at the time, he was more concerned about his ego and reputation.
“I wished I had been able to go back in time to that photo and remember what my reactions with Joy and Roger were like. To really understand what impact we’d had with them and what our wanting to solve that case had meant to them.”
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