It is not uncommon for people to stay in a court building for hours after their case has been dealt with and some will stay until closing time. Driving home from Penrith that day I wondered what the local shop owners thought of the spectacle of reporters and camera crews running across the car park after a man brandishing a wig and cap.
The owner of a café that used to be on the ground floor of the Downing Centre Court building in the CBD used to tell me stories of how people would come up to the counter and ask if there was a back door they could use or if they could ‘hide out’ in the kitchen until the media went away. He had a routine answer for them, the cool room was available, but none ever took him up on it.
Often when a huge media pack would surround the main doors waiting for someone to come out, the café owner and his staff would come out with tea towel in hand and ask, ‘Who are you all waiting for today?’
In 2009 I covered the trial of one of the men accused in the P&O cruise ship death of Diane Brimble. He was so keen not to be filmed he pushed open a fire door at the Downing Centre setting off alarms before diving into a taxi.
Another case at the Downing Centre on 16 June 2011 involved one of the Church of Scientology’s most senior figures who was accused of perverting the course of justice by intimidating an eleven year old girl into providing false statements to police about the sexual abuse she had suffered. The woman left the building surrounded by dozens of her colleagues who once they got outside onto the footpath, formed a human shield around her with open umbrellas around her trying to protect her from our cameras. A couple of them were also filming the media.5
Outside the former ICAC building in Castlereagh Street for the Mount Penny mining licence inquiry in February 2013. From left to right: Andrew Whitington, camera operator; me; Michael Lamrock, sound operator.
Once outside the same court building a colleague’s microphone was snatched out of her hand and thrown onto the road. On many occasions I’ve pulled my own microphone with the ABC flag on it away just seconds before people have slammed their car doors shut.
The ‘dark sunglasses’ and ‘towel over head’ technique are common disguises, along with one witness I saw lying on the back seat of a car under a blanket but then sat up too soon at nearby traffic lights only to be filmed by a tenacious camera operator who had followed him.
I sometimes wonder would it not be easier to just walk outside quietly and say nothing.
11
Looking for love
IN JUNE 2017 I was waiting outside the King Street Courthouse during a short adjournment with Channel Seven court reporter Leonie Ryan. We were talking about what we usually talk about: evidence we had just heard, upcoming cases and her pet dog, Hugo the pug. Leonie had recently come back from annual leave to find a three-page love letter waiting for her in the Channel Seven newsroom.
It was from an inmate serving time in the Goulburn Supermax prison. In the letter he wrote how he fell in love with her when he saw her in the public gallery covering his murder trial. He said he was reminded of her every time he watched the television news and that she could come to jail to interview him about anything and that he would answer every question she asked.
‘Don’t wait for him. He’s doing at least twenty years,’ a lawyer standing behind us overhearing our conversation jokingly chipped in. The lawyer also told Leonie her admirer is the sort of person who would shoot someone dead in broad daylight at point-blank range.
‘Don’t respond to this man,’ the lawyer said.
Leonie had never intended to respond to him but the conversation turned to some of the murder trials we had covered involving people who have searched for love.
Wife over cliff killer
There are a lot of lonely, trusting people who will believe anything a potential mate tells them. Some of these lonely hearts become victims of dating agency and online scams and lose all their money. New South Wales woman Janet Campbell (formerly Fisicaro) lost her life.
Janet, forty-nine, died in March 2005 just six months after marrying ambulance paramedic and former police officer Des Campbell.
They met in 2003 when Campbell was working as a paramedic in Deniliquin in southern New South Wales where Janet had lived for most of her life with her close-knit family. She was his third wife and after her death Campbell told police she had fallen from a fifty-metre cliff when she left their tent at night to go to the toilet on an Easter camping trip in the Royal National Park. Yet her family always maintained that she hated camping and was scared of heights.
When Janet first met Des Campbell she was a widow who had inherited money and two properties from her late husband Frank Fisicaro, who had died in 1997.
She married Campbell in secret on 17 September 2004 because her family didn’t like him and had tried to talk her out of the marriage because they had heard rumours he had used other women for their money.
The following month she paid for a house in Otford near the Royal National Park, north of Wollongong, although Des Campbell told a friend that he was the one who paid for it. Campbell moved straight into the house and had two other girlfriends sometimes stay there with him without telling them about his new wife. Janet stayed living in Deniliquin for six months after they married and only moved to the Otford house she had paid for on 18 March 2005.
She told her Deniliquin family the day before she moved, that she had married Des Campbell and just under a week later, on 24 March 2005 she died on the camping trip.
The court heard that Campbell had three affairs during his brief six-month marriage to Janet and that he ‘spun a web of lies’ to stop the women that he was seeing knowing about each other.1
It also emerged during his trial that just a week after Janet’s death, Des Campbell took a girlfriend on a holiday to Townsville. The jury was told he did not go to Janet Campbell’s funeral, that he paid $79.95 to put his profile up on the internet dating site RSVP soon after her death and that he contacted several women on the website. He also locked her family out of the house when they came to collect her things after she died.2
A former girlfriend had also testified that she had to sue Campbell to get back some of the money she had once given him to buy a house.3
As details of Des Campbell’s treatment of Janet unfolded throughout his trial, women would look at each other in the public gallery.
‘How could he do that?’ someone behind me whispered loudly one afternoon during the closing addresses to the jury.
‘Imagine meeting him on RSVP,’ another woman said to her friend, sitting next to me on the verandah outside the King Street Courthouse during the lunch break while I was writing and filing stories. They looked about the same age as Janet Campbell and I asked if they had any connection to the family. The women said no but that they had read about the trial and had come along to have a look.
‘My ex cheated on me and lied all the time,’ offered one of the women. ‘But just twice I think. Who knows. I haven’t seen him for years.’
I found it hard at first to imagine that someone could be as trusting as Janet Fisicaro, given the concerns her family had raised about Des Campbell and given what we heard during his trial about how he treated other women.
But how was she to know what he was really like? You can’t go through life never trusting anyone and some people really do marry the partner of their dreams a few months after meeting them and live happily ever after. Janet had met Des Campbell when he was working as an ambulance officer, a job that involves helping and caring for people, and having seen him coming and going from court, I imagined him coming across as someone who could be charming and polite.
Campbell was on bail during his trial right up until the jury went out to decide on his fate and he was always neatly dressed and quiet as he came and went from the court each day.
What was harder to get my head around was how brazen he was in abusing this woman’s trust and sneaking around behind her back after they were married. Did he not ever think he would be caught
out or that someone would see him with one of the other women and that it would get back to his new wife?
Yet as his barrister Sean Hughes had pointed out to the jury, Campbell was not on trial for his morals, even though he might be thought of as a ‘philanderer’. He was on trial for a murder charge.
The trial judge, Justice Megan Latham, reminded the jury of this too in her summing up to them. She said people can’t be convicted of a crime because they are not liked or are despised and told the jurors not to let any sympathy they felt for Janet or her family to cloud their judgment.45
Campbell did not give evidence at his trial and was calm and steely faced in the witness box. I saw him cry just once when a tape of his police interview was played. In that interview he described how he used a rope from his backpack to climb down the cliff and find his wife’s body after she fell. He had also told police that Janet Campbell’s family interfered in his marriage and that they were very controlling.5
So as not to prejudice their decision about his guilt for the murder charge, the jury was not told a lot of the details about Des Campbell’s past, especially his past employment. Before he became a paramedic, he had worked for nine years as a police officer in Victoria, but left the force in 1994 after being charged with assault. He had also worked as a constable with Surrey Police in the UK for three years.6
The Crown case was that Campbell was motivated by greed and wanted Janet’s money to pay off his debts. In his closing submissions to the jury, Senior Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC said Janet was worth more to Des Campbell ‘dead than alive’ and that she, on the other hand, was besotted with him.7
On 18 May 2010 after a four-week trial, a Supreme Court jury found fifty-two year old Campbell guilty of Janet’s murder by pushing her off the cliff.
Sentencing Des Campbell to at least twenty-four years jail for the murder on 3 September 2010, Justice Latham said he showed no contrition or remorse that could have worked in his favour.8 The judge said he took the life of a naive, middle-aged, country woman, whom he manipulated and deceived and who died far away from her friends and family.
Justice Latham said that the position of a shoeprint at the edge of the cliff from which Janet had been pushed and a broken branch near it suggested that she was conscious and aware of her fate just before she went over the edge.
‘In those moments, the magnitude of her mistake in believing that marriage to the offender opened a fresh chapter in her life must have come home to her,’ she said.
The judge also noted the derogatory comments Campbell made about his new wife to others, despite the love that he pretended to have for her.9
‘The offender told his sister-in-law that there was a woman at the hospital, who was “stalking” him, that she was very wealthy but “pig ugly” and he did not know if he could bring himself to “shag her”,’ said Justice Latham. ‘He also made distasteful and derogatory comments about her to two former work colleagues.’10
Justice Latham said Campbell used his new wife’s money to pay off his own personal debts and that just a week after marrying her he got her to change her will. The judge said he lied to her about needing money to pay off a loan on a property he owned in Bendigo, Victoria, where his parents lived.
‘The offender’s parents in fact owned their own home with no mortgages,’ the judge said.
She also noted that Campbell never told anyone in his own family about his new wife.
Des Campbell sat staring at the judge as his sentence was read out. I wondered if he had any insight at all that day into how his behaviour affected those around him. Justice Latham said the former police officer had been put in protective custody in jail because of the high-profile nature of the case.
When Des Campbell was sentenced, Janet’s brother, Kevin Neander confronted him from his seat in the public gallery.
‘Don’t drop the soap,’ Mr Neander said loudly as Campbell was led away by the court sheriffs.11
Outside the court that day Mr Neander told reporters, ‘I just hope he does it hard. I hope he looks over his shoulder for the next twenty-four years.’
But he said, what he wanted more than anything in the world that day was to be taking his sister Janet back home to Deniliquin with him.12
Neander told the media that the family had had suspicions about him all along.
‘We tried to warn her but she was madly in love with him and she just couldn’t see what the man was like, I don’t think. Both my sisters, Terese and Mary, they got in Jenny’s ear, but she was just besotted by him. She said everyone’s entitled to a second chance,’ he said. ‘Love is a powerful thing. Love is blind, they say.’13
Other family members watched the sentence that day from Deniliquin via video link. In September 2014 three judges in the New South Wales Court of Criminal Appeal dismissed Des Campbell’s appeal against his conviction and sentence, ruling that the prosecution case was ‘extraordinarily powerful’.
At Des Campbell’s murder trial, Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC had used the same witness he used in the Gordon Wood murder trial — physics expert Associate Professor Rod Cross. Professor Cross had told the Des Campbell trial jury that a shoe print found at the crime suggested Janet Fisicaro had been pushed off the cliff near where her body was found.
So when Des Campbell’s legal team appealed against his conviction and sentence, they argued that because Gordon Wood had been acquitted due to problems with using Rod Cross as an ‘expert’ crown witness, Des Campbell should also be acquitted.14
However, the appeal judges said, although Rod Cross might not have had the experience to give the type of evidence that he gave in Des Campbell’s trial, they were satisfied Des Campbell was guilty of murdering Janet Fisicaro and they did not think there had been a miscarriage of justice.15
Fatal first date
Seven years after Des Campbell was found guilty of murder, I was back in the same King Street Courthouse covering another case that involved someone losing their life in the search for love.
The circumstances of this case were very different, but like Janet Campbell, the victims of this crime were people trying to start over again.
There were emotional scenes in the court on 22 September 2017 during the sentencing hearing for forty-five year old Alexander Villaluna who attacked his ex-partner and murdered the man she was out on a first date with in a Korean restaurant.
After meeting forty year old Jovi Pilapil on the dating app Tinder, fifty-three year old Keith Collins arranged to have a first date with her at the Kangnam BBQ restaurant at Hornsby in Sydney’s north on 30 March 2016.
Jovi Pilapil had taken an AVO out against Alexander Villaluna, who was a former nurse, after they had separated a few months earlier.
After Villaluna came into the restaurant, he walked up to the table and stabbed both Pilapil and Collins several times. Villaluna then calmly walked outside with blood all over his hands but returned and sat down at a table until police arrested him.
Keith Collins died at the scene. Jovi Pilapil, although seriously injured with stab wounds to her arms and stomach, managed to get away and retreat to a shop nearby.
Villaluna pleaded guilty to his crimes and at his sentencing hearing, reporters were seated in the jury box to leave the public gallery free for members of the victim’s family and the offender’s family.
As some details about the stabbing were recapped in court and victim impact statements were presented to Justice Robert Beech-Jones, some members of Keith Collins’ family were visibly upset.
The court heard that Keith Collins, a business owner from the New South Wales Central Coast, was a kind and community-minded man who was well liked and who supported local sporting events. He had done nothing wrong and nothing to offend anyone.
It must have been especially confronting for his family when video footage of the attack from the restaurant was played in the court on a large screen. The first-date couple were the only ones in the restaurant at the time of the stabbing and the v
ideo clearly showed Villaluna stabbing Keith Collins several times. The offender first put his arm around Keith Collins before stabbing him in the neck and then the side of his body until he fell down to the restaurant floor.
Villaluna, who sat quietly in the dock, couldn’t look at the victim’s family members in the public gallery, but as he was sitting directly opposite me, I thought he looked uncomfortable at times watching the video himself.
The gallery was very still and quiet as the video was played and at one point Keith Collins’ son Thomas Collins stood up and glared angrily at Alexander Villaluna. The men were only a few metres from each other in the public gallery, and fearing some sort of verbal or physical altercation, the court sheriffs quickly got up from their seats and stood closer to both of them. Perhaps realising nothing would be achieved by saying or trying to do anything to the offender, Thomas Collins then just walked out of the courtroom.
Agreed facts released by the court that day revealed that Villaluna had bought a hunting knife at Parramatta a couple of weeks before the attack. His lawyer read a statement on Villaluna’s behalf to the victim’s family that said the offender was still angry about everything that had happened to him and that he found it hard to apologise.
The Crown Prosecutor Gina O’Rourke SC told the judge that Villaluna had carried out a brutal attack on a defenceless stranger because of his anger and jealousy.16
On 12 October 2017 Alexander Villaluna was jailed for forty years with a non-parole period of 30 years.
Justice Beech-Jones said:
Keith Collins was brutally stabbed to death by the offender in a public place for no reason other than he attended a dinner date with the offender’s ex-partner. Ms Pilapil was viciously wounded at the same time and for the same reason. These were cowardly and vicious attacks.17
The judge noted that the offender had shown no remorse.
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What happens in public galleries
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