by Justine Ford
Coombes further told detectives that he and Raechel arrived at Nicole Godfrey’s place before midnight, where he introduced the women. He said the three of them had a few drinks and listened to music before Raechel lay down on a bed in the spare room. After Godfrey had gone to sleep, he claimed to have walked past the guest room and heard Raechel calling out to him. He said she wanted to discuss the three alleged rapists again.
Coombes then claimed that Raechel told him she had actually allowed for both TJ and PJ to be sexually assaulted and gave the reason, ‘Girl’s gotta pay her debts’. According to Coombes, this made him extremely angry so he put her in a sleeper hold and strangled her.
He then reported waking up Nicole Godfrey to ask for a cup of coffee before grabbing a box of knives and some cord from his car. It was then that Coombes says he dragged a lifeless Raechel into the bathroom, where he tied her feet to the taps of the bath and began to dismember her.
He said that he periodically had to empty the bath as it filled with Raechel’s blood and made him throw up.
In her interview, Nicole Godfrey said to police: ‘I know she was chopped up in the bathroom. He took her in the bathroom because I was in bed and I had the TV on a little bit and I had my hands in my ears so I couldn’t hear anything and I just, I’ve just wiped it all from my memory and just to be able to cope with it.’
Godfrey also made the shocking claim that Coombes invited her into the bathroom while he was doing the terrible deed. ‘Come and have a look,’ he reportedly encouraged. ‘Come and watch.’
‘I just told him I want it out of my house,’ she said.
She told police that Coombes also asked her, ‘Do you want to come in and do a dissection or have a look at anything?’
Godfrey said she did not but remained in the house as Coombes continued hacking up Raechel’s body. She said she could hear ‘like popping. Like when you – I’ve had my arm dislocated before and I know damn well what it sounds like when you pop a joint and I could hear it’.
What happened next was just as disturbing. Coombes put Raechel’s body parts in plastic bags and dumped them from the Newhaven Pier like garbage.
In a later interview with police, two days before Christmas 2009, Coombes went into even more detail, drawing a diagram to show the way he had dismembered Raechel’s body. ‘I’ve given her a quick release,’ he said. ‘It’s more than she fuckin’ deserved, way more than she fuckin’ deserved.’
He told investigators that he ‘had to keep thinking, it’s no more than a piece of meat’.
And then he revealed how he kept it together to get the job done.
‘The soul’s gone from the body, it really is just decaying flesh matter at that point. I know it is a human being, but the soul was gone. And I know I am responsible for taking that fucking soul.’
•••
When Raechel was a little girl, playing on the monkey bars with the other kids, her mum Sandra could never have imagined that her life would end so early and so violently. Understandably, Sandra’s own life will never be the same again. Once a focused career woman, she may never be able to work again because she is so overwhelmed with grief. ‘I couldn’t bear to have fourteen people a day say “How are you?” to me. I couldn’t talk to anyone …’
Grappling with the obscene nature of her daughter’s mutilation murder, the only way Sandra can cope is to put on her physiotherapist’s hat. ‘The fact that I’ve dissected bodies [as a trainee physiotherapist] and years ago skinned and boned buffalo means I’m more able to understand these things than the average person,’ she says. ‘I know that it’s not that easy to cut off a leg, you have to dislocate the hip and get to that ligament and cut it.
‘So I had this image of Coombes not knowing what to do and how it would have been a struggle for him to work it out.’ It seems Sandra was right because the job had taken Coombes all day – but it’s little consolation. ‘Raechel’s murder is on my mind every single day,’ she continues. ‘Multiple times a day. It’s stuck in my brain.’
Unfortunately, there are others who have been devastated by Raechel’s murder too. ‘Her sisters have been hugely affected,’ Sandra tells. ‘They had night terrors. It was horrid, absolutely horrid.’
Another dreadful experience came nine months after Raechel’s leg was found, when her body parts were released to the funeral director.
‘I went to the funeral parlour and spent a bit of time there,’ Sandra says, her voice cracking. Sandra recalls looking in the coffin at her daughter’s leg, which was covered in bandages. ‘A lot of people don’t understand why I wanted to do that and read everything and see every photo,’ she says, in tears, ‘but for me it’s like being there for Raechel every step of the way …’
From the outset, Sandra was convinced that Coombes was lying to cover up his true nature, particularly regarding his claim that Raechel had arranged for the girls to be assaulted. ‘No-one who knows Raechel even hesitated about that. There’s no way in the world she would have set those girls up for any harm of any kind. Any kind of sexual offence was so abhorrent to her.’
Sandra believes even the suggestion Raechel showed Coombes pornographic images is nonsense. ‘In Raechel’s belongings there was not a single piece of porn. But from his flat they [the police] took six videos,’ she reveals.
As you might imagine, everything about the man known to his associates as ‘Father Christmas’ sickens Sandra to the stomach. It’s a sentiment echoed by Raechel’s friends. ‘One of them said to me that when Coombes dies there’ll be people throwing rocks and spitting.’
David Snare doesn’t mince words when it comes to Coombes either, describing him as a ‘cunning, manipulative serial killer’.
On 26 August 2011, a jury agreed and triple murderer John Leslie Coombes was found guilty of the murder of Raechel Renee Betts. This time, however, he got life without parole.
In sentencing, Justice Geoffrey Nettle said Coombes displayed ‘a frightening predilection for homicide’. He noted Coombes’ history of lying and stated, ‘I am satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that a substantial part of what you told police and others about the deceased’s death, and particularly your allegation that she claimed to have been involved in the sexual assault of the young girls, is a fabrication or confabulation calculated to conceal the true nature and gravity of your offending.’
The judge went on to say, ‘The weight of evidence is that the deceased was deeply attached to both girls and spent what money she had in providing for them. Indeed, it appears reasonably possible that the main reason she gave up her work as a teacher and took to drug dealing full time was to provide for the girls while spending more time with them.’
So why did Coombes kill Raechel Betts?
One thing was for sure, Justice Nettle was not buying Coombes’ make-believe story that he did it because Raechel had arranged for the teenage girls to be abused.
In 1998, when Coombes was sentenced for the murders of Kells and Speirani, experts called on his behalf suggested Coombes had psychological problems as a result of the head injury he sustained from the road accident in 1974. In this court case, however, it was not contended that the head injury was at the root of Coombes’ problems; rather, that it was because he’d allegedly been sexually abused as a child.
Coombes had made various claims, including that his stepmother was part of a paedophile ring that regularly met to abuse him and other children. He claimed he was anally raped and that on several occasions, his head was held under water in a bath while he was abused. Coombes said that the abuse ended when he was thirteen and he hit one of his attackers on the head with a baseball bat. He also claimed that he could not bear to see images of children being abused.
It was an argument that had to be considered and Justice Nettle did not rule out that Coombes had, to some extent, been abused in the past, but again, questioned what was fact and what was fiction.
His Honour said, ‘The sort of details of which he [Coombes] spoke are publicised
in a number of resources, including sentencing decisions, and for all one knows they may well be the subject of discussion among prison inmates. At all events, they are sufficiently easily ascertained that one could not have much confidence that [his] knowledge of them derives solely if at all from personal experience.’
Summarising these findings, the judge went on to say, ‘I am not persuaded on the balance of probabilities that you were sexually assaulted to the extent that you claim; still less that it caused you to murder the deceased.’
It appears the real reason behind Raechel’s murder is more likely because she was dealing drugs for one of Australia’s most dangerous men.
While Justice Nettle couldn’t say beyond reasonable doubt that drugs were the reason for Raechel’s brutal murder, he granted that there were suggestions in the depositions that Coombes murdered her ‘because of a drug deal gone wrong or because she became a liability to [his] drug-dealing activities, or because she was not sufficiently careful in maintaining security’.
He did not accept that Coombes showed true remorse over Raechel’s murder and also said, ‘It passes understanding that a sane human being could hack up and destroy the body of another as if, to use your own words, she were just a lump of meat.
‘The heinousness of that conduct is shocking. It bespeaks an utter disregard of the law and basic norms of society and depraved inhumanity towards the deceased, her family and her loved ones.’
For Raechel’s mum, Sandra, it was a relief that Coombes was finally going away for good, although nothing could take away her all-consuming grief. ‘It will always affect me hugely because she was my daughter and my firstborn and such a focus of my life.
‘And now she’s gone …’
‘It was a terrible thing for the family,’ David Snare says. ‘On the one hand you want to give them closure, but it’s never going to be enough.
‘No-one’s life should end like this. The only consolation is that Coombes won’t be free to kill again.’
Three strikes …
Chapter 11
Be Prepared
Boy scouts find bones in the bush
‘It would have been quite a surprise for the scouts to come upon human remains. Especially somewhere that was off the beaten track.’
Detective Brevet Sergeant Lucy Schiek, South Australia Police
Bones make news.
Especially in South Australia, which is notorious for some of the most gruesome discoveries of human remains in Australian history.
Among those discoveries were the skeletal remains in the late 1970s of seven young women aged between fifteen and twenty-six around Truro, north-east of Adelaide. The women had been sexually assaulted and murdered by a depraved monster named Christopher Robin Worrall, who died in a car accident in 1977. His accomplice, James William Miller, who has since died from liver failure, was jailed for six of the murders, having helped Worrall dispose of the bodies in the bush.
A few years later, in the 1980s, ‘The Family Murders’ made headlines when five young males between fourteen and twenty-five were abducted, sexually assaulted, mutilated and murdered, their remains dumped disrespectfully as if they were illegal garbage.
Former accountant Bevan Spencer von Einem was found guilty of one of the murders – that of fifteen-year-old Richard Kelvin, the son of prominent Adelaide newsreader Rob Kelvin. Disturbingly, Von Einem’s sociopathic cohorts have still not been brought to justice, and are believed to have hailed from Adelaide’s haughty upper crust. Rumours persist that lawyers, businessmen, politicians and doctors were all part of the most twisted and murderous paedophile ring this country has ever seen.
More recently, in 1999, South Australia was rocked by the ‘Bodies in the Barrels’ serial killings, in which eight of the eleven victims of the Snowtown killers, led by John Justin Bunting, were found in barrels of acid in a disused bank vault in Snowtown, 145 kilometres north of Adelaide. Three days later, two more bodies were found in a backyard in the suburb of Salisbury North.
Prior to those gruesome discoveries, two elderly farmers had stumbled upon human bones in a shallow grave on their property at Lower Light, also north of the city. Years later, police would find out that those bones belonged to yet another of Bunting’s victims.
With horrendous crimes like these imprinted in the state’s psyche, it is no wonder any detection of human bones puts South Australians on edge and sends the rumour mill into overdrive.
Curiously though, when human remains are found, the explanation is not always a sinister one.
The 2011 find of bones in the Mount Lofty Botanical Gardens, for example, turned out to be Aboriginal ancestral remains, a surprise to the media especially, which had immediately jumped back on the ‘It must be the Snowtown killers’ bandwagon.
Similarly, when skeletal remains were found the year before only a few short kilometres away, it wasn’t a ‘whodunnit’ that faced police.
It was simply a ‘who is it?’
•••
Boy scouts are famously told to ‘Be Prepared’, but when their founder, Robert Baden-Powell, came up with his now well-worn motto, he probably hadn’t thought to prepare his budding young adventurers for the discovery of human remains. The occasional set of animal bones, sure, but not parts of a human skeleton.
‘It was two o’clock on Saturday 17 July 2010 that the remains were first brought to our attention,’ explains Detective Brevet Sergeant Lucy Schiek from Mount Barker CIB in the Adelaide Hills. ‘My partner and I were contacted by a uniformed officer who’d been required to attend Mount Lofty after a group of scouts doing an orienteering exercise off the beaten track came across some bones in woodland off a disused fire track. They were obviously human bones so they called the police.’
The uniformed officer secured a 10 by 10 square metre area, a cumbersome task given the hilly terrain, which the officer neglected to warn Lucy and her partner about. ‘It was billy goat country,’ Lucy laughs, recalling the degree of difficulty they had reaching a location that did not regularly have foot traffic. ‘It took us half an hour to get to the officer in our suits because we weren’t prepared for a hike.’
Even the boy scouts had been challenged by the topography, which is how they chanced upon the remains in the first place. ‘There is a walk from Waterfall Gully to Mount Lofty,’ Lucy explains. ‘The kids had been on the Heysen tourist trail and had ventured off.’
The stunning Mount Lofty Botanical Gardens, much of which was donated by a generous local so that the Cleland Botanical Gardens could join up with the Mount Lofty Botanical Park, covers almost 100 hectares, much of which is thick with vegetation. Such was the case where the remains were found – down a steep hill in a gully, partially obscured by dense scrub and trees.
By the time Lucy and her partner had struggled down the embankment, however, the remains came into clear view. ‘We could see most of the skull,’ Lucy says. ‘We could see that part of the spine and the pelvic bone were together on the ground. There were also a few scattered bones.’
Whenever a human body – or part of one – is found, police must follow strict protocols so that they don’t contaminate the scene. ‘We contacted the Major Crime Section and the Physical Evidence Section,’ Lucy says. ‘So it wasn’t until the guys from Physical Evidence got there that we were able to take a closer look.
‘The Physical Evidence guys found a black substance at the scene and we said, “What’s that?” They told us it was a charred backpack or something like that, and that a fire had been through the area.’
A closer analysis of the remains also told Lucy that she did not have a homicide on her hands – something investigators have to consider whenever human bones are found. ‘We were able to form the belief that this person had gone there to hang themselves from a tree which hung over a ledge. A controlled burn-off had gone through and the nylon rope had melted and the body had fallen to the ground. The way the pelvis had landed almost made it look like the person was sitting.’
> Also found at the scene was a small, damaged tin, and the frames of what appeared to have been aviator-style glasses. ‘We also found some coins dating back to 2008,’ Lucy goes on to say. That detail told Lucy that the person before her had not died prior to that year.
As you would expect, Lucy’s next job was to find out who the body belonged to, so she enlisted the help of the police pathologist and a forensic odontologist. ‘The odontologist took photos and radiographs and constructed an odontogram,’ Lucy explains. An odontogram, often used in the identification of human remains, is a method of numbering an individual’s teeth and charting dental restorations such as fillings and crowns.
‘The odontologist concluded that the skull’s features indicated he was a male, aged between twenty-five and thirty-five, of Mongoloid ancestry.’
The man’s teeth also reinforced the odontologist’s opinion that the dead man was of Asian descent. ‘Some of the chemical compounds in his dental restorations were not used in Australia and must have been done in Japan or China,’ Lucy says. ‘They weren’t cheap procedures either, so the person must have had a reasonable amount of money – or perhaps his family had.
‘One possibility was that he might have been a student from a wealthy family who’d come here to study.’ It’s not a farfetched theory given that up to three in ten university students in Adelaide come from overseas.
Unfortunately, when Lucy checked the South Australian Missing Persons database, she couldn’t find anyone who matched that description who had gone missing in 2008 or later. She then sent the details to the other states and territories but despite a number of responses, there was no match.
In September that year, Lucy was granted permission to remove DNA from the hanged man’s remains in order to conduct a ‘Search and Match’ against the South Australian DNA database.
‘On Wednesday 29 September I was advised that they’d been able to provide a pretty good DNA profile,’ Lucy says. Again, she didn’t get a hit in South Australia and the profile was promptly sent to DNA management sections in Japan, China, Malaysia and Indonesia. ‘But still there were no matches,’ Lucy says, clearly disappointed. ‘Nothing.’