Into the Darkness Read online

  INTO THE DARKNESS

  Robin Bowles is the author of a number of best-selling true crime books, including the definitive books on the Jaidyn Leskie murder, Justice Denied, and the disappearance and alleged murder of British tourist Peter Falconio, Dead Centre. She lives and writes in Melbourne.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3065, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  First published by Scribe 2016

  Copyright © 2016 by Robin Bowles

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  Excerpts and quotes from statements and transcripts reprinted with kind permission of the Coroners Court of Victoria. Unless indicated otherwise, all photos supplied by the Handsjuk family.

  9781925321531 (Australian edition)

  9781925307764 (e-book)

  A CiP data entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For the Tiger Mother who fought so fiercely for her Tiger Cub. May they be reunited in a different jungle.

  PHOEBE:

  From the Greek Phoibos (bright one),

  derived from phoibos (bright and shining).

  In Greek mythology, Phoebe is the name

  for Artemis, the goddess of the moon.

  In poetry, Phoebe is the moon personified.

  CONTENTS

  People who appear in this work

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 That Night

  CHAPTER 2 The Police Take Charge

  CHAPTER 3 The Aftermath

  CHAPTER 4 Phoebe

  CHAPTER 5 The Lead-Up

  CHAPTER 6 The Investigation

  CHAPTER 7 Memorials

  CHAPTER 8 Determination

  CHAPTER 9 The Inquest Begins

  CHAPTER 10 The Security Evidence

  CHAPTER 11 Trespassing

  CHAPTER 12 The Hot Seat

  CHAPTER 13 The Retired Detective

  CHAPTER 14 Missing Evidence

  CHAPTER 15 The Psychologist

  CHAPTER 16 Phoebe’s Friends

  CHAPTER 17 The Cops

  CHAPTER 18 The Bloody Details

  CHAPTER 19 Los Trios Medicos

  CHAPTER 20 The Best Friend

  CHAPTER 21 Analysis and Tears

  CHAPTER 22 The Star Witness

  CHAPTER 23 The iPhone

  CHAPTER 24 Loose Ends

  CHAPTER 25 Last Days

  CHAPTER 26 Mallacoota

  CHAPTER 27 Waiting for the Finding

  CHAPTER 28 The Outcome

  EPILOGUE Last Rites

  APPENDIX Sydney Criminal Defence Lawyers’ Comment on Kristina Hampel’s Sentence

  Acknowledgements

  PEOPLE WHO APPEAR IN THIS WORK

  POLICE AND FORENSIC INVESTIGATORS — ON THE NIGHT

  Acting Senior Sergeant Andrew Healey

  Detective Senior Constable Angela Hay

  Senior Constable Justin O’Brien

  Constable Clare Hocking

  Sergeant Graeme Forster

  Detective Sergeant Mark Butterworth

  Detective Senior Constable Gareth Howells

  Detective Stephen Cooper

  Leading Senior Constable Bernard Carrick

  Detective Senior Constable Justin O’Brien

  Sergeant Mark Robertson

  Senior Constable Martin Koslowski

  POLICE INVESTIGATORS — HOMICIDE

  Detective Senior Sergeant Shane O’Connell

  Detective Senior Constable Jason Wallace

  Detective Sergeant Gerard Clanchy

  THE CORONER

  His Honour Peter White

  POLICE ASSISTING THE CORONER

  Detective Senior Constable Brendan Payne from South Melbourne Crime Investigation Unit (police informant)

  Detective Sergeant Sol Solomon

  THE BARRISTERS

  Deborah Siemensma (Counsel assisting the Coroner)

  Simon Moglia (Counsel for the Handsjuk family)

  Bob Galbally (Counsel for Ant Hampel)

  Rob O’Neill (Counsel for the Commissioner of Police)

  HEALTH PROFESSIONALS

  Kristie Cooke (paramedic)

  Judith Walker* (psychologist)

  Dr Matthew Lynch (pathologist)

  Professor Stephen Cordner (forensic expert)

  Associate Professor Narum Gunja (specialist in clinical toxicology)

  Professor Olaf Drummer (head of forensic scientific services)

  Dr Morris Odell (forensic physician)

  Louise Brown (forensic biologist)

  BALENCEA

  Eric Giammario (on-site manager)

  Tony Basile (OC Manager)

  Beth Ozulup (concierge)

  Ruth Foster* (resident)

  TECHNICAL SPECIALIST

  Neil Bone, the managing director of Wastech

  HAMPEL FAMILY

  Antony (Ant) Hampel (Phoebe’s partner)

  George Hampel (Ant’s father)

  Felicity Hampel (Ant’s stepmother)

  Kristina (Krissy) Hampel (Ant’s sister)

  Suzanne Owen (Ant’s mother)

  Robert Owen (Ant’s stepfather)

  HANDSJUK FAMILY

  Phoebe Handsjuk (victim)

  Len Handsjuk (Phoebe’s father)

  Natalie Handsjuk (Phoebe’s mother)

  Lorne Campbell (Phoebe’s grandfather)

  Amanda Campbell (Lorne’s second wife)

  Jeannette Campbell — also called ‘Marm’ (Phoebe’s grandmother/Lorne’s first wife)

  Tom Handsjuk (Phoebe’s brother)

  Nikolai (Nic) Handsjuk (Phoebe’s brother)

  Lucy Handsjuk (Phoebe’s step-sister)

  FRIENDS

  Russell Marriot (then partner of Natalie)

  Linley Godfrey (Phoebe’s boss/society hairdresser and photographer)

  Brendan (Bren) Hession (Phoebe’s friend)

  Sarah ‘Missy’ Howett (Phoebe’s friend)

  Viv Bambino (Phoebe’s friend)

  Keith Allan (family friend/Phoebe’s friend)

  Alice Jagger* (Phoebe’s friend)

  Julie* (Phoebe’s friend)

  Isobel van Dyke* (Ant’s friend)

  Kate Rowland (now deceased — Ant’s friend)

  Arch and Linda Cohen* (Ant and Phoebe’s friends)

  Charlie, known as ‘Chili’ (Len Handsjuk’s friend)

  Christo Van Egmond (Ant’s friend)

  Matt Flinn (Ant’s friend)

  Andrew Chiodo (former boyfriend of Krissy Hampel)

  MY SLEUTHING COMPANION

  Miss Deva

  * indicates name changed for privacy

  PROLOGUE

  Viewed from the street, the exclusive Balencea apartment tower looks imperturbable, rising like an obsidian obelisk above Melbourne’s busy St Kilda Road. The owners’ corporation keeps the 60-metre black glass edifice glistening so that there’s nothing to block
the residents’ view over the central business district and the surrounding parkland to Port Phillip Bay.

  Inside the building, though, 2 December 2010 was an uneasy sort of day. It started when the fire alarm went off about 11.30 a.m. and all 23 floors of the building had to be evacuated. There was quite a fuss, but it turned out to be a false alarm.

  The day manager, Eric Giammario, missed the action because he was off at a hearing of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal in the city, though he was back by the time the afternoon concierge, Beth Ozulup, arrived. Beth was due to start her shift at 4 p.m., but she was five minutes late, and Eric jokingly reprimanded her.

  He stayed on for about an hour after the handover to catch up on things that had happened in his absence. The garbage compactor had just had a major service, and he meant to look in and make sure it was functioning properly before he left. But he hadn’t got around to it at 5 p.m., when Beth reminded him that he’d need to get going if he wanted to clear St Kilda Road before the peak-hour traffic turned it into a car park. Eric had to take his son to a music lesson and couldn’t be late, so he quickly took off, telling Beth to look into the rubbish room and check the compactor.

  Beth was feeling a bit unsettled after Eric’s reprimand, and things kept going wrong. At 6.05 p.m., the fire alarm went off again. It was very unusual to have two fire alarms in one day. Both alarms were set off by contractors working on the penthouse. Heat from their tools set off the first one, and the second time they’d rewired something incorrectly. Beth was downstairs when the alarm sounded and a painter from the penthouse came down to try and turn it off. The two of them were in the fire control room when the fire brigade arrived and turned it off for them.

  Fortunately, there was no need for an evacuation, but Beth rang Eric to report the incident. False alarms requiring the fire brigade to attend also had to be recorded in a logbook, because they had to be paid for.

  Beth had seen the firefighters off by 6.35 p.m. and was just about to sit down to a nice cup of tea when one of the residents knocked on the office door.

  ‘There are crumbs in the lift,’ he complained. ‘Someone’s left a real mess.’

  ‘I’ll see to it straight away,’ Beth replied. She reluctantly got to her feet and entered the resident’s complaint in the afternoon logbook, then headed for the cleaner’s cupboard in the hall near the lift and pulled out the vacuum cleaner, which was haphazardly pushed in among the buckets, brooms, and mops. She plugged the cleaner into the power point beside the lift, opened the lift door, locked the lift to hold it in position, and flicked the switch on the vacuum cleaner. Nothing. She gave the machine a bit of a kick. Still nothing. With a deep sigh, she unlocked the lift and put the vacuum cleaner back in the cupboard. Looking round the cleaning cupboard, she couldn’t see the manual sweeper. It was going to be one of those shifts.

  She looked across the hallway at the locked door of the compactor room, where the dustpan and brush were kept. She’d have to go in there and get it. On a normal shift, Beth rarely went into that room. The conveyor belt in there had sensors that activated when a bin was full and moved it along without any assistance from the concierge. There were five bins, and the day manager usually dealt with them before the rubbish truck came around.

  Beth didn’t like the smell in the compactor room. People in the apartments threw the most unbelievable stuff down the rubbish disposal chutes — out of sight, out of mind. Never mind the poor concierge who dealt with the mess at the bottom if it overshot the bin. But she’d told Eric she’d check the compactor room, so she might as well do it now. Keys in hand, she crossed the hall and unlocked the door. She tried to open it, but something was in the way. She gave the door a frustrated push with her shoulder and opened it further, triggering an automatic sensor that flooded the room with light.

  Inside the room, a bin had tipped over off the conveyor, and there was rubbish everywhere. Beth said to herself, ‘I’ll have to clean that up now.’ It wasn’t a pleasant prospect. Then she saw something else jammed between the door and the wall. It was a bleeding, mangled mass, which looked like the body of a young dark-haired woman, lying motionless on her back.

  Beth later said that her first thought was that the figure might be a mannequin, another bit of weird stuff some resident had thrown out.

  She backed away, closed the door of the compactor room, and stood outside for two or three minutes, gathering her thoughts, before she opened the door again and peered in.

  Though she couldn’t bring herself to look at the body on the floor, what she saw in her peripheral vision left her in no doubt that the motionless figure was a flesh-and-blood human. The compactor room was a scene of carnage. There was blood everywhere. Congealing blood trails led towards the body, and the rest of the floor was covered in rubbish.

  Beth screamed and ran to the office. Without thinking, she rang Eric, who was standing in a queue at a McDonald’s in Essendon, on the other side of town. She was incoherent, but he caught the words, ‘Dead! Blood! Rubbish room!’ He told her to ring Triple-O and said he’d come straight in.

  So Beth rang Triple-O and told them what she’d found. Then she rang her sister and went out into the hall, where she ran aimlessly up and down, wringing her hands and crying.

  Within minutes, police cars from the nearby St Kilda Road complex arrived at the forecourt in response to her call. So began the investigation into the death of Phoebe Handsjuk, a beautiful young woman who had every reason to live and no reason to end her life.

  CHAPTER 1

  THAT NIGHT

  Antony Hampel, known to all as Ant, drove his Range Rover into the Balencea building’s basement car park at 6.05 p.m., using his security fob to open the gate. He’d made an early start in the gym that morning at 8.15 a.m., then left home just after 9 a.m. for a busy day at his events company in Richmond, interspersed with meetings off site.

  Using his personal key fob, which only gave access to the level where he lived, he took the lift and let himself into his twelfth-floor apartment. He later couldn’t remember if his front door was locked when he arrived. His American Staffordshire bull terrier, Yoshi, greeted him effusively. As usual, Yoshi showed no shame for the mess he’d made, pulling cushions from the couches and generally causing chaos. Ant hated mess of any sort, but seemed to allow Yoshi latitude in an avuncular way.

  There was no sign of his flatmate and partner, Phoebe Handsjuk. Their relationship had been pretty rocky of late, with Phoebe threatening to move out; Phoebe moving out, then back in; Phoebe drinking too much; Phoebe disappearing to spend time with people Ant considered ‘low-lifes’; tearful returns, and prescription drugs to help her sleep it all off and start again.

  When Ant looked on the kitchen counter, he noticed Phoebe’s keys and handbag. That was puzzling. You could leave Balencea without keys, but you couldn’t get back in. And where would she go without her handbag?

  Several Post-it notes containing strange scribbles were stuck to the kitchen counter. The cleaner had wiped the benches down the previous day, so the notes were new. He went into the bedroom and found what he later called a ‘shrine’ on the bed, consisting of a photo of himself and Phoebe, a photo of her cat, and a whole lot of ‘rambled notes … the notes she writes when she’s smashed and they don’t make a lot of sense’, as he later described them. There were candles burning, and Phoebe’s hair-straightening tongs were on the floor, plugged into a socket in the bathroom.

  At 6.51 p.m., about forty minutes after Ant came home, Phoebe’s father, Len, called her on her iPhone.

  Len and Ant have different memories of what happened next. According to Len, who based his recollection on the numbers shown on his phone bill, Ant answered the call on Phoebe’s phone. Ant said he didn’t hear Len call Phoebe’s phone, but called him from his own phone at 6.52 p.m. because he thought Phoebe might have gone to meet Len.

  When they spoke, Len explained he
was trying to call Phoebe because she’d arranged for the three of them to catch up for dinner that night at the Golden Triangle, one of her favourite restaurants, to celebrate Len’s birthday two days earlier. Len was ringing to ask what time they should meet.

  ‘She’s not here,’ Ant said. ‘Her bag and keys are here, so she can’t be too far away.’

  The news worried Len. The day before, Wednesday, Len and several other members of the family had received a strange text message from Phoebe’s iPhone number. The message said:

  Hi family. I am in bed and about to sleep and when I WAKE I will transform into the most incredible human bein you’ve ever seen … (not). I will go to hospital. It’s safer there and I hear the special tonight is tomato soup … Delicious! Nutritious! I love you all very much but not enough to send an individual text. Sorry about that, but time is sleep and I must b on my way … … Merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream. xo

  Phoebe had sent the message to Len, Ant, her boss, Michelle Silvana, her mother, Natalie, her brothers Tom and Nik, her grandmother, Jeannette Campbell, and Natalie’s partner, Russell Marriott.

  Natalie received the message just as she was boarding a plane in Alice Springs to fly home after a nine-week stint working in the Western Desert. She was so concerned that she called her mother, Jeannette, in Mallacoota, a coastal township in eastern Victoria, and asked her to check on Phoebe.

  Also perturbed by the strange message, Jeannette rang Ant on his mobile at 10.35 a.m. and asked him if Phoebe was all right. He said he hadn’t seen the message and had left Phoebe sleeping peacefully that morning, but he’d swing by and check on her, as his office wasn’t far from home. Jeannette then sent Natalie a text saying Ant had assured her that Phoebe was fine. When Natalie arrived in Melbourne later that day, she sent Phoebe a text asking her to call when she woke up.

  Len was worried when Ant told him that Phoebe wasn’t in the apartment. He suggested that Ant report her missing, but Ant wasn’t keen on the idea. He said, ‘They don’t listen until 48 hours have passed, and she’ll be back by then.’

  Len, who is a psychiatrist, had called from the car park outside his office after a long day at work. Still sitting in his car, he phoned his son Tom and asked him to call a friend who might know where Phoebe might be.