Missing You

by Justine Ford

  Chapter 10

  Three Strikes

  The story of Raechel Betts, the girl with the floral tattoo

  ‘Believe me, I haven’t lost sight of the fact that, you know, three strikes you’re fuckin’ out, boy.’

  John Leslie Coombes, serial killer

  It was like a scene from an American crime show: a man jogging on a beach discovers a woman’s severed leg. The jogger calls the fuzz, who have to work out who she is and find out who butchered her. In theory it should be easy to ID her thanks to some distinctive ink on her left foot.

  But this is a mystery that won’t be solved in a neat TV hour …

  •••

  Finding the woman’s leg washed up at Newhaven Beach on Phillip Island on Sunday 16 August 2009 was one hell of a discovery for the hapless jogger, but he steeled himself and phoned police straightaway.

  After seeing the leg for themselves, local uniformed officers contacted the Wonthaggi CIU, who in turn got onto the Homicide Squad in Melbourne, where Detective Senior Sergeant David Snare’s crew was tasked with the job. David allocated the investigation to one of his highly skilled team members, Detective Senior Constable Tom Hogan.

  ‘The tide was coming up so the leg had to be removed, so they took a quick photo and it was conveyed to the Coroner’s Court where it stayed while we tried to identify who it belonged to,’ David says.

  In the meantime, the SES looked for further remains, while Search and Rescue and the Water Police concentrated on the bay. They found nothing else that day, although the following day the skipper and crew of the Sorrento ferry reported seeing another leg in the water, but were unable to retrieve it. A search for the limb was conducted but it couldn’t be located.

  So where do investigators start when all they have is a mutilated limb and no idea who it belongs to? ‘We went through records of reported missing people,’ David says, ‘but nothing came up.

  ‘The pathologist said it was a younger person though and it was quite easy to see it was a female.’

  The police did a tattoo search through their system but it appeared that the victim hadn’t been in trouble with the law. ‘When a person has had dealings with police we record a description of their tattoos. But in her case, nothing was recorded,’ David says. ‘So after twenty-four hours when we still didn’t have an identity for her leg we tried to get DNA samples from it.

  ‘We also contacted the other states to see if the tattoo was in their system but that came up with nothing.’

  It’s almost impossible to run a murder investigation when you don’t know who’s been murdered, and with the first forty-eight hours of an inquiry being crucial, David’s boys quickly turned to the public for their help. ‘We released a picture of the tattoo to the media on the 18th of August, which went out to the papers and television. It got quite a lot of coverage.’

  Sandra Betts, a Melbourne physiotherapist, remembers that day better than most. ‘I was at work and I saw a newspaper article. I was walking back to my physiotherapy department and it caught my eye. I stopped and felt a bit puzzled when I read that they’d found this leg and there was a tattoo on it, but it gave me the impression it was on the woman’s thigh so I walked on.’

  The grim image flickered in and out of Sandra’s mind all day because her daughter Raechel had a tattoo just like it, except hers was on her left foot, not her thigh. ‘I came home and was looking at ABC online. This time there was a colour photo of the tattoo and I realised it was on the woman’s foot so I just freaked.

  ‘I said to my other daughters, Raine and Kirra, “Is Raechel’s tattoo on her left or right foot?” They weren’t sure so Raine looked around and found a photo of Raechel dancing barefoot at a wedding.

  ‘“It’s on her left foot,” Raine said.’

  Sandra’s heart sank.

  She instinctively knew that the dismembered leg belonged to her firstborn daughter, Raechel, whose safety she’d been worried about for months.

  •••

  Sandra Betts’ daughter, Raechel, had been a bright little girl, who cared about her friends and was good at school. ‘She was a very exuberant person, a confident, outgoing person,’ Sandra says. ‘She had a fun way of doing things, always joking around and that.’

  When Raechel was just six, however, ‘she said she’d been molested’. The charges were ultimately not pursued but Raechel’s life would never be the same again. ‘She always felt that affected her self-esteem and as she grew up she wore her grandfather’s old coats – she went through a boyish phase to cover herself up.’

  She became the perfect mini-mum, though, when her half sisters Raine and Kirra came along. ‘When Raechel was eleven I had Raine, my second daughter, and fifteen months later I had Kirra.

  ‘Raechel got pretty involved with the young ones. She particularly liked to nurse Kirra.’

  When Raechel finished school her love of children led her to RMIT in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora, where she gained a Bachelor of Education specialising in Early Education and Adult Learning.

  From there, the young teacher started working in the childcare industry and began to thrive. ‘She got a lot of reward from the unconditional love of the children and she helped a number of parents who had autistic children too,’ Sandra says. ‘Of course it was her dream to someday have children of her own.’

  That dream might have come true in 2007 when, at twenty-five, she fell pregnant to her fiancé. But sadly, around the same time, Raechel was diagnosed with pre-cancerous cells in her cervix and was unable to take the pregnancy to term. It was a terrible blow and the strain took its toll on her relationship, which broke down soon after.

  ‘After she lost the baby and her fiancé she just felt too alone. Things weren’t going the way she wanted,’ Sandra explains. ‘She was very upset, scared she wouldn’t be able to have a baby, and scared the dysplasia cells would give her cancer and kill her.

  ‘It just amplified and amplified.’

  Enter two troubled teenage girls looking for a mother figure – ‘PJ’, who was fifteen, and ‘TJ’, aged thirteen.

  Raechel had met the girls at a friend’s place where Sandra says they used to ‘turn up to look for food or bot a cigarette’. When the young girls told Raechel their woes, she allowed them to move in with her because they didn’t want to live at home.

  According to Sandra, having the girls there was her way of filling a void. ‘She adored children and was hung up on having them. She never got over losing one and that threw her into the trajectory where everything went wrong.’

  Raechel helped one of the girls with her grades and encouraged the other with vocational-based learning. They soon grew close. ‘I think she loved them like a mother,’ Sandra explains. ‘But it was a lot of responsibility though for someone so young – at that time Raechel was only twenty-seven.’

  The wannabe mum was also working two jobs at childcare centres to make ends meet. ‘The girls had Centrelink allowances but Raechel would still be paying for things out of her pocket. Then the kids had friends who’d come around. Raechel didn’t like some of these unknown young people coming around to her place and the whole thing was stressing the hell out of her.

  ‘She ended up quitting one of her jobs basically to care for the kids.’

  Raechel’s life continued to unravel when she was faced with an allegation that she had ‘stolen’ one of the teenage girls from her family. Sandra Betts says the claim didn’t go down too well at work and she was sacked, thus prompting a downhill slide from which Raechel would never recover.

  Before being stripped of her income, Raechel had been a recreational marijuana user but her mum says, ‘As she got depressed she was doing more of other drugs. Then she met a young fellow who was her age and he used to come and see her. They had a bit of an affair, I suppose.’

  Under normal circumstances a little romance might have been just what the doctor ordered – but not in this case. ‘He knew she’d lost her employment,’ Sandra says, claiming that
her boyfriend introduced her to two of his associates, one of whom was a fifty-four-year-old man named John Leslie Coombes, known variously to his friends as ‘Father Christmas’, ‘Santa’ or ‘Pop’.

  Coombes had begun his working life aged fifteen as an apprentice mechanic, then became a truck driver in the Australian Army until he was discharged in 1974 after sustaining a head injury in an accident. As the years went by he took on various jobs, including a stint in hotel management. Perhaps the hospitality industry was where he learned the gift of the gab.

  ‘They came around at the end of the year [2008] for a sit-down meeting,’ Sandra continues. ‘I think that’s what they call it – like in The Sopranos or something. Their whole thing was to say, “You’ve got these amazing people skills, you can talk under water, you could make a lot of money.”’

  Raechel liked the idea of earning a good income but was hesitant because she’d have to peddle illicit drugs. ‘I’ll help set you up,’ Coombes reportedly told her. ‘I’ll finance you into it.’

  Raechel took up Coombes’ offer to become a drug dealer, figuring all she had to do was take the gear – methamphetamine (otherwise known as ice), MDMA (ecstasy), cannabis and other drugs of dependence – from A to B. But she didn’t factor in the favours she’d have to do for Bad Santa. ‘To pay her debt she had to get a car fixed up for Coombes,’ Sandra says, who was horrified when Raechel confessed to her that she was pushing drugs for him.

  After the car was fixed, Sandra drove it to Coombes’ flat herself. ‘I stood out the front on the grass and said, “Here’s your bloody car. We won’t be paying for anything more for you. You have to register it yourself.”’ In response, Coombes, who’d clearly earned the Santa moniker because of his white beard and pot belly, said very little. ‘He just stood there in his dressing gown and singlet. He didn’t even open his flyscreen door at first,’ Sandra recalls. ‘But my impression that day when I saw him was that he is dangerous.’

  Sandra’s impression was spot on because the flabby fifty-four-year-old had been found guilty not once, but twice, of murder. In 1985 Coombes had been found guilty of the knife murder of Henry Desmond Kells on 17 November 1984. He’d been given a life sentence but was out on parole after just eleven years. The year 1984 had been a busy one for Coombes, because while on parole he was also convicted of the murder of Michael Peter Speirani on 26 February that year. Coombes had stabbed Speirani, then dumped his body from a boat in Port Phillip Bay before mutilating his remains beneath the boat’s propeller. For that gruesome murder, Coombes was sentenced to fifteen years in jail with a non-parole period of ten years.

  So in 2007, Coombes was out of prison yet again with two murders under his belt and another chance at freedom.

  Unfortunately, by 2009, the killer Coombes hadn’t done much to clean up his act, turning to a career as a drug supplier. During that time his stranglehold on Raechel Betts grew as her drug dependency spiralled out of control. ‘She was getting really paranoid and saying that odd things were happening,’ Sandra says. ‘She’d say, “I think the house has been broken into”, or, “We’ve been drugged, sexually assaulted and the bedding’s been pissed on”, which it had. She also had a fear someone had put cameras in the house.’

  The drugs might have been messing with Raechel’s mind, but her mum remains sure that some of what she was saying was grounded in fact because ‘one of the girls had pulled a metal cylinder out of a vent in the kitchen, showed it to Raechel and said “I think it’s some kind of camera device”’.

  Sandra adds, ‘Just dealing with these people made her feel unsafe. And she was associating with all sorts of dangerous characters.

  ‘A known criminal and too much drugs would be enough to unsettle you. But I strongly believe Coombes was also playing mind games with her.’

  One of those ‘mind games’ involved telling Raechel she and the girls had been filmed during the alleged sexual assault, and the images posted on the internet. ‘“Someone told me they’ve seen these photos and they’ve put them online,” Raechel would tell me. I’d say, “Well who is it that tells you this?” and she wouldn’t say.

  ‘But I believed it was Coombes.’

  Raechel was so distressed about the possibility of drugging and sexual assault that she and the girls left their home in the Melbourne suburb of Doncaster to seek refuge at the home of a good friend and his wife at Mill Park, where they went to a medical centre to be examined.

  Soon after, Raechel’s granddad, Neville Betts, feared she was becoming suicidal, so he arranged for her to be involuntarily admitted to the Northern Hospital in June 2009, where she was treated for drug-induced psychosis. While she was in there, family members and friends trawled the net for the lurid images that had caused Raechel so much anxiety, but they eventually concluded that the images probably never existed and that Coombes had made it all up to keep her scared and subservient.

  ‘He is a psychopath type of a personality,’ Sandra says. ‘He is extremely good at behaving normally and hiding his true nature. He grooms people for trouble …’

  But the trouble had only just begun.

  On Monday 10 August 2009, after being released from the mental health facility, Raechel had a sleep-over at another old friend’s place in Epping. Her friend later recalled how Raechel talked in code about drugs with a man named John on her mobile phone and later said she was going away with him. She’d also told two other associates that she was going with her ‘boss’ on a ‘fishing trip’.

  But everyone knew – even the teenage girls in Raechel’s charge – that a ‘fishing trip’ was code for drug business.

  What the girls couldn’t have known, however, was that the woman they regarded as a surrogate mother was never coming back …

  •••

  Shaken to the core by the discovery of the severed leg with the distinctive tattoo, Raechel Betts’ granddad, Neville, took it upon himself to go to Knox police station in the middle of the night. ‘He told the young constable at the counter that he thought the tattoo belonged to his granddaughter,’ David Snare says. ‘He’d seen it on the news or the internet and had come in.’

  Immediately, David Snare headed to the station to meet with Neville. ‘So two things were happening that night – Neville was reporting his granddaughter missing, and even though I knew it was her I couldn’t say that for sure. And that’s tragic, because you’ve got to wait on DNA to prove an identity.’

  David remembers, ‘Neville was pretty distraught. He knew his granddaughter had had a pretty checkered life, but come what may, she was still his granddaughter.

  ‘After I got the constable to take his statement, I went back home, had a shower and came back. And that’s when all hell broke loose.’

  •••

  DNA proved that David Snare, Tom Hogan and the team were indeed investigating the murder of Raechel Betts so in order to find out everything they could about her, they quickly got intelligence on board.

  ‘We talked to her mum, her grandfather and the people who knew where she was living, and then we went to the associates,’ David says.

  David and his crew quickly found out where Raechel was living and that she’d gone away on a ‘fishing trip’ with someone who was known variously as ‘Uncle’, ‘Pop’, ‘Santa’ and ‘Father Christmas’. ‘And it didn’t take long to find out who he was through people that knew them,’ David adds.

  Of course John Leslie Coombes was known to police – well known – having been found guilty in the past of not one, but two murders. One had even been at Phillip Island, where Raechel’s leg was found, and also involved mutilation and the dumping of a body at sea. The similarities were too great to ignore. ‘So we knocked on his door,’ David says. ‘He said he knew her but that he didn’t know where she was.’

  As the weeks progressed (and three more pieces of Raechel’s flesh washed up), David’s crew spoke to all of Raechel and Coombes’ associates, many of whom Coombes had under tight control as they were involved in the dist
ribution of illicit drugs.

  ‘We did checks in relation to his phone records, in relation to his e-tag movements, and found that he’d had phones bouncing off towers heading towards Phillip Island so we believed he’d headed down that way before the murder.

  ‘The phone checks showed he’d been in contact with a woman named Nicole Godfrey, who was living on the island, so from there we concentrated on her and him.’

  Coombes had a lover, Maureen Renwick, but also enjoyed an occasional sexual relationship with Godfrey, who was twenty-nine years his junior and claimed to be bipolar. Like many of the women in Coombes’ orbit, Nicole was a drug user.

  ‘We installed listening devices and got intercepts on his phone,’ David Snare reveals. ‘Nothing definite came out of those but we started working around the edges of his associates – the drug links and links to clandestine labs.

  ‘We’d located the leg on the 16th of August and she was last seen on the 16th going away with her “uncle”.

  ‘And that was him.’

  •••

  ‘It’s a tactical decision when you arrest someone,’ David Snare reveals. ‘You’ve got to wait until you’ve got enough evidence.’

  Eventually, after a tireless three-month investigation, David and Tom believed they did have enough evidence and decided to arrest Coombes over the murder of Raechel Betts.

  With more than thirty years in the Force, David Snare had learned to expect the unexpected – but even he didn’t anticipate what happened next. ‘Coombes confessed…he said he was responsible,’ David says. ‘I was surprised because he’d been in jail twice before for murder.’

  According to Coombes, he and Raechel met up on Tuesday 16 August 2009, and stated the reason they were going to Phillip Island was to kill or maim three men whom Raechel alleged had raped ‘TJ’. On the way, Coombes said, they stopped at a service station for coffee, where Raechel showed him pornographic images on her mobile phone or camera, which she claimed were of the teenager being assaulted. Coombes told police he didn’t think he was looking at a rape; he thought they were clips from an X-rated movie.