Caroline Reed Robertson’s deadly obsession with beautiful dancer Rachel Barber led to murder
RACHEL Barber had everything going for her — she was a beautiful talented dancer with a handsome boyfriend. That’s why she was murdered.
CAROLINE Reed Robertson was a dangerous and jealous predator who, like a good hunter, studied and stalked her prey from under camouflage.
A loner with manipulative and frightening tendencies, Robertson hid behind a pleasant facade.
By acting as friend to her intended victim, pretty dance student Rachel Barber (and Rachel’s parents and younger sisters), Robertson was able to inveigle her way into the Barber family’s circle of trust.
Rachel was everything Robertson could never be.
An elfin-featured teen with emerald eyes, Rachel lived to dance and danced to live.
While Robertson could never have imagined Rachel’s life being other than perfect, the ingenue had struggled with studies at school and was desperately miserable when she wasn’t dancing.
And, like any kid desperate to succeed in a chosen field, she was said to fear failure.
A fan of classical music since her early childhood, the 15-year-old full-time dance student possessed the required potential for a career on stage and in front of the camera.
“She wasn’t interested in school work but had a talent for dancing,” her mother, Elizabeth Barber, once told police.
“We decided to allow Rachel to pursue what she was talented at.”
In a world where jealous predators abound, every butterfly has its enemies.
Robertson, five years older than Rachel, hated herself and her own life.
She had always been an ostracised, nondescript type of girl — unfashionable, overweight and with a depressed disposition.
She had such a bleak outlook that, according to a psychologist’s report, she “once painted and hung a portrait of herself which was completely black”.
Robertson wormed her way into the Barber’s world thanks to her younger sister being school friends with one of Rachel’s younger sisters.
It was through this friendship that Robertson would often babysit the Barber girls.
Those were the nights Robertson (who changed from her family name via deed poll) would stew on her own lot in life, and resent Rachel’s life while coveting it.
Rachel, the diminutive dancer, seemed to have it all; talent, good looks and popularity.
In Robertson’s mind, Rachel could have been one of those models or entertainers who graced the covers of glossy teen magazines.
Like the grub desperate to transform into the butterfly, Robertson — who described herself in writings as a “pizza face” with “brown oily hair and no co-ordination” — desired to be Rachel.
Supreme Court judge Justice Frank Vincent would say Robertson harboured an “abnormal, almost obsessional interest” in the chosen younger girl.
The infatuated Robertson once asked Michael and Elizabeth Barber if she could photograph their eldest daughter for a project she was working on.
The project was a plot to murder.
In late 1998, the highly rated Dance Factory studio, in Richmond, accepted Rachel as a student.
A fellow student named Emmanuel Carella caught her eye, and the two started a relationship.
Classmates were soon calling the pair Romeo and Juliet.
Just like the Shakespearean play, the relationship was bound for tragedy.
As Rachel’s dancing skills and a potential modelling career blossomed, Robertson was working a desk job with a mobile phone service provider in St Kilda Rd, Melbourne.
In chats with her boss she claimed she had “friends” involved in theatre and television.
“I was a bit surprised by this as Caroline didn’t strike me as being interested in the arts,” her boss told police.
Robertson also mentioned she’d spent a lot of time on a family farm north of Melbourne as a child.
That property was in Kilmore.
Robertston stayed in touch with the Barber family.
On one occasion in the summer of 1999 she asked one of the younger Barber girls for Rachel’s birth date and later tried to obtain a copy of her birth certificate.
The grub had now formed into a chrysalis, as police believe Robertson was, by that stage, taking steps to kill Rachel and, in some ways, assume her identity.
Robertson’s diary would confirm this, with written entries talking of lacing pizza with “drowsy powder”.
One entry read: “On the way to dance school, say that she can’t tell anyone that she’s meeting me as I’m not allowed to give the study results to anyone — ethics — highly confidential. Not even your boyfriend/parents ... Drug Rachel (toxic over mouth), put body into army bags and disfigure and dump somewhere way out. No car ...”
Another entry read: “Check farm (including bag) ... Tuesday arrange bank loan ... Moving van ... Night to disguise hair ... Thoroughly clean house, and steam clean carpet.”
The night of Sunday February 28, 1999, was the last night the Barber family spent together.
Rachel spoke to someone on the phone.
According to phone records, it was Robertson who called Rachel that night.
Robertson had tricked Rachel into meeting her the next evening after dance classes, offering the younger girl $100 to take part in a “psychology study”.
The following morning, Michael Barber dropped Rachel at a tram stop.
She was to meet her dad back at the tram terminus at 6.15pm.
Rachel remained guarded that day, telling her dance classmates she had a paying job that night.
Her friends assumed it was a modelling job.
“I questioned her about this and she told me not to worry about it,” Emmanuel recalled in a police statement.
“It was strange that she was so secretive about it.”
Rachel met up with Robertson and the two caught a tram.
A former Dance Factory student, riding the same tram that night, later told police: “I remember Rachel looked quite beautiful and that she was striking in contrast with this other girl, who was plain looking.”
The two girls stepped off the tram in Prahran and walked to Robertson’s flat.
What happened next is not exactly known, but according to Robertson’s broken recollections, she enacted her murder/transformation plan once inside.
After possibly drugging Rachel with the “drowsy powder” on pizza slices, Robertson wrapped a length of telephone cord around Rachel’s slender neck and strangled her.
A report written by psychologist Michael Crewdson said in part: “She said that she told Rachel to think of happy and pleasant things. There is a poignant and disturbing moment in which Rachel Barber’s fate seemed to waver in the balance.”
According to Robertson, she hesitated for a moment when the “veil lifted” but, believing she had taken the plan too far to stop, “the veil dropped again”.
Robertson stuffed Rachel’s body in her wardrobe, as if discarding a doll.
The cord was still wrapped around Rachel’s neck.
The Barbers, meanwhile, grew worried that night and reported Rachel as missing.
The next day, Robertson left the body in her wardrobe and went to work.
Appearing pale and sick, she was driven back home.
After recouping some owed money from a friend, Robertson called in sick the following day. She wrapped Rachel’s body in two rugs and stuffed it in an army bag, before hiring a truck.
She told the driver she was moving a sculpture and travelled with him to her father’s Kilmore farm where she buried the clothed body in a pet cemetery amid a clutch of trees near a dam.
As the Barber family continued a public campaign to locate their daughter, Robertson applied for a $10,000 bank loan.
Detectives believe she was going to use the money to relocate herself interstate.
But the net began to close on the wannabe butterfly.
Detectives had linked Robertson to Rachel through phone calls.
The Barbers said she was a family acquaintance.
It was a connection that had to be investigated.
Robertson continued to miss further days of work, calling in sick each time.
She was sweating on the bank loan to be approved so she could make her break.
It was Friday March 12 when missing persons unit detectives found Robertson unconscious on her bedroom floor.
It is believed Robertson, an epileptic, had suffered a fit.
In another room, police found a bag containing some of Rachel’s clothes, and an application for a Victorian birth certificate in the name of Rachel Elizabeth Barber.
Robertson was taken to hospital, where she told a detective that Rachel was dead and buried next to an old pet of hers on her dad’s farm in Kilmore.
With the help of Robertson’s father, David Reid, detectives found Rachel’s buried body — the makeshift garotte cord still wrapped around her neck.
Robertson, 20, answered no questions put to her during a record of interview and was charged with murder.
Evidence came to light suggesting she had planned to take on Rachel’s persona and flee Victoria using the alias Jem Southall, a character she described in her writings as a 16-year-old “total revhead”.
Southall was Elizabeth Barber’s maiden surname.
Robertson’s writings revealed how she had profiled Rachel as a “white picket fence” — a symbol of perfect purity.
“Rachel was always ‘wild’. Let run barefoot in the country. Began dating very young. Very talented at classical ballet (rebelled and gave up a few times). Tried modelling. Dropped out of school early Year 9. Began new dance school. Strikingly attractive — dancer’s body. Very clear pale skin, hypnotic green eyes, dyed hair lots of different colours.”
IN October 2000, Robertson pleaded guilty to murder.
During her Supreme Court plea hearing, she sobbed in the dock as her barrister, Colin Lovitt, QC, read aloud her anguished writings of self loathing and hatred.
“I feel like a troubled and tortured lost soul who has been thrown into a world of angels,” she wrote.
She called herself an alien with “horrible things bottled up inside”.
In a report for the defence, forensic psychiatrist Justin Barry-Walsh said Robertson selected a victim whose qualities she believed were sadly lacking within herself.
“It is possible that she thought she could somehow magically reinvent herself in the image of the victim,” the report stated.
According to prosecutor Jeremy Rapke, QC: “It does seem likely that the motive is to be found, if at all, in the accused’s obsession and her jealousy of (Rachel’s) attractiveness, popularity and success.
“And perhaps a desire on the part of the accused to emulate the success of a younger person with whom she had become infatuated.”
In sentencing 21-year-old Robertson to 20 years’ jail with a minimum term of 14 ½ years, Justice Vincent said the malevolent woman killed “to achieve an unrealisable and unreal dream”.
“(You were) motivated by envy of (Rachel’s) beauty and her personality and above all, I am satisfied, because you believed that she would be likely to have a happy and successful life of a kind that you anticipated you would never experience,” the judge told her.
“What has emerged from all of the material, in my opinion, is that you suffer from a deeply entrenched personality disorder which contributed to your conduct and, at this stage at least, you represent a real danger to any who may become the unfortunate subject of your fixation.”
A film about the case, called I Am You and starring the likes of Sam Neill, Guy Pearce and Rebecca Gibney, was shot in 2009.
It screened on Foxtel’s movie crime channel last year. (2013)
Robertson became eligible for parole in August last year, when the Herald Sun obtained a jail photo showing how she had finally transformed from her “Spotty Dotty” image.
The photo stunned Rachel’s parents, who had not seen Robertson since she was sentenced in November 2000.
“I wouldn’t have recognised her in the least. She’s totally different,’’ Elizabeth Barber said.
It was also revealed that Robertson, now in her mid 30s, had entered into a lesbian relationship with a fellow inmate.
The Adult Parole Board has confirmed Robertson will be released on parole on January 20 next year.
The Barber family hopes Robertson will “live a quiet life and not cause any trouble” when she is finally set free.
Originally published as Caroline Reed Robertson’s deadly obsession with beautiful dancer Rachel Barber led to murder