Suspect in "Easey Street" cold case murders extradited to Australia after arrest in Italy
A man accused of two "gruesome" unsolved killings in 1977 has been extradited from Italy and will appear in an Australian court Wednesday, police said.
Perry Kouroumblis, 65, has been charged with killing two women in an almost 50-year-old cold case dubbed the "Easey Street" murders.
The dual Australian-Greek citizen was arrested at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport in September after he was named in an Interpol red notice, and has been held in jail since.
Victoria Police said he was sent back to Australia late Tuesday evening and would be interviewed by detectives before appearing in court Wednesday afternoon.
"The man will formally be charged with two counts of murder and one count of rape during this court appearance," they said in a statement.
The bodies of Suzanne Armstrong, 27, and Susan Bartlett, 28, were discovered at their house in Easey Street, Melbourne, on January 13, 1977, with multiple stab wounds. The pair had last been seen alive on the evening of January 10, 1977.
Armstrong had been raped. Her then 16-month-old son "was left unharmed and had been unattended in his cot when police located their bodies," police said in a statement.
"It was an absolutely gruesome, horrific, frenzied homicide -- multiple stabbings," Victoria Police Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said after the arrest in September.
Detectives in 2017 started carrying out DNA tests on dozens of suspects interviewed in the initial investigation.
Kouroumblis allegedly moved to Greece a short time after he was approached to provide a sample.
Police offered an Aus$1 million (US $680,000) reward for information helping solve one of the state's most infamous cold cases.
"Over the past four decades, a significant and tireless investigation into the murders has been conducted by detectives from the Homicide Squad," police said Wednesday.
