Daniel Holdom pleads guilty to murders of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and Khandalyce Pearce
A CONVICTED sex offender has pleaded guilty to murdering a young mother and her two-year-old daughter, then dumping the child’s remains in a suitcase found years later by the side of a South Australian country highway.
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A CONVICTED sex offender has pleaded guilty to murdering a young mother and her two-year-old daughter, then dumping the child’s remains in a suitcase found years later by the side of a South Australian country highway.
A week before he was due to face trial over the double murder, Daniel James Holdom appeared in the NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday morning to enter an 11th hour guilty plea to the murders of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and toddler Khandalyce Pearce.
The 42-year-old was in a short relationship with Ms Pearce-Stevenson and the pair left Alice Springs in the Northern Territory together, with Khandalyce, in late 2008.
While the couple was staying at Holdom’s relative’s house in Canberra’s northern suburbs, he lured Ms Pearce-Stevenson to Belanglo State Forest in NSW’s Southern Highlands on December 14, 2008.
Court documents show Holdom stepped on the 20-year-old mother’s throat and crushed her windpipe before leaving her body in the forest.
He also took photographs of her body. Those graphic images were found by a woman known to Holdom on an SD card years later.
The skeleton remained in the forest, which gained a notorious reputation as serial killer Ivan Milat’s dumping ground, for two years before motorbike riders discovered the bones on the Red Arm Creek in August, 2010.
NSW Police went to great lengths to try and identify the remains.
A facial anthropologist was brought in, Interpol records searched and images of a T-shirt found near the skeleton — with the word Angelic printed on it — were released to the media.
At the same time, Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s family, who didn’t know she was dead, was leading their own search.
The family had lost contact with the young mother, a keen netball player who was nicknamed Mouse as a child, and they were desperate to hear from her.
However, it would be another five years before Ms Pearce-Stevenson was identified in a remarkable DNA breakthrough.
After Holdom murdered Ms Pearce-Stevenson, he returned to Canberra and traded in her maroon-coloured 1986 Holden Commodore for another car.
On December 19, 2008, he left Charnwood in Canberra with Khandalyce and claimed he was travelling to South Australia to drop her at her grandmother’s house.
Instead, he drove to Narrandera, near Wagga Wagga, and checked into a motel with the blonde-haired toddler, affectionately known to family and friends as Khandles.
Holdom, who drifted in and out of jail since his 20s, bought duct tape, dish cloths and garbage bags from a supermarket on the way.
According to the Crown case statement tendered in court, Holdom killed the little girl before putting her body in a suitcase.
He drove towards South Australia, where he dumped the suitcase on the side of a desolate highway near Wynarka in the rural Murray Mallee Region.
Seven years later, in July, 2015, a passing motorist found the suitcase by chance.
He noticed a small jaw bone among a pile of tattered clothing and called police.
It took three months of public appeals and police releasing images of the clothing found in the suitcase, before investigators finally discovered who the little girl was.
In October, 2015, someone called Crime Stoppers claiming they had a photograph of a little girl named Khandalyce with the same distinctive quilt that was found in the suitcase.
South Australian Police retrieved Khandalyce’s medical records from her home town in Alice Springs and were able to match the records to a DNA profile extracted from the bones found in the suitcase.
The focus then turned to the whereabouts of Khandalyce’s mother, Karlie Pearce-Stevenson.
Pulling Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s medical records allowed investigators to match them against the DNA profile from the bones found in Belanglo State Forest years earlier.
It was a sensational development linking two unsolved crimes in different states but some of the most disturbing details were yet to be uncovered.
Within days of identifying the mother and child, police had their sights on Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s former boyfriend, Holdom.
He was already in Cessnock jail, serving a jail term for sexually assaulting an eight-year-old at a caravan park on the Central Coast in 2013.
In a six-hour police interview canvassing 2000 questions, Holdom changed his story on several occasions, only increasing police suspicions.
Days later, Holdom contacted NSW homicide squad detectives, claiming he had examined his conscience and wanted to come clean.
He told police his friend had dropped the mother and daughter at a bus stop in 2008 and he never saw them again.
In a second interview, Holdom offered to go “Crown witness”.
Unbeknown to him, the evidence against him was mounting.
Police already had mobile phone records putting him in the Belanglo State Forest area around the time Ms Pearce-Stevenson was killed.
It was later uncovered that more than $70,000 had been siphoned from Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s bank account after she was murdered.
Her Centrelink payments were stolen and a woman in a wheelchair pretending to be Ms Pearce-Stevenson turned up to a credit union in Adelaide’s northern suburbs in 2010 with her identity documents.
Ms Pearce-Stevenson’s mobile phone was also used in the years after her death to contact her family in messages and phone calls that provided a false sense of security she was safe and well.
Her mother Colleen Povey, who died from breast cancer in 2012, filed a missing persons report with NT Police in 2009.
But the case was closed five days later after someone purporting to be Ms Pearce-Stevenson called her mother and said she was fine.
The decision to close the missing person investigation was a mistake because Ms Pearce-Stevenson had not been physically sighted, the court has previously heard.
As a result the fraud, fake phone calls and cover-up of the murders continued for years.
Holdom was charged with two counts of murder in 2015.
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